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240 that material condition, after having once left it, would be as impossible as the restoration of the acorn, already

absorbed into a sprout which has risen above the soil, to its primitive condition. The seed which has germinated has a new form and state of existence. When the belief of life in matter is gone, the error which has held it dissolves with it, and never returns to the old condition. No correspondence or communion can exist between persons in such opposite dreams as the belief of having died and left a material body, and the belief of still living in an organic, material body. The author always discredited mediumship.

The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does it return to fraternize with

or control the worm. Such a backward transformation is impossible in Science. Darkness and light, infancy and manhood, sickness and health, are opposites, — different beliefs, which never blend. Who will say that infancy can utter the ideas of manhood, that darkness can represent light, that we are in Europe when we are in the opposite hemisphere? There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, and the physical, or corporeal.

In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step, or return to positions outgrown. The so-called dead and living cannot commune together, if they are in separate states of existence, or consciousness.

This simple truth lays bare the mistake that man

dies as matter, but comes to life as spirit. The so-called dead, in order to reappear to those still in the existence visible to the physical senses,