Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/558

536 to create? Ideas of Truth alone are reflected in the myriad manifestations of Life; and thus it is seen that man springs solely from Mind. The belief that matter supports Life, would make Life, or God, mortal.

The text, “In the day when Jehovah God made the earth and the heavens,” introduces the record of material

creation which followed the spiritual, — creation so wholly apart from God's, that Spirit had no participation in it. In His creation ideas became productive, obedient to Mind. There was no rain, and “not a man to till the ground.” Mind, instead of matter, being the producer. Life was self-sustained. Birth, decay, and death arise from the material sense of things, not the spiritual; for in the latter, Life consisteth not of the things which a man eateth. Matter cannot change the eternal fact that man exists because God exists, and nothing is new to the infinite Mind.

In Science, Mind neither produces matter, nor does matter produce Mind. No mortal mind has the right

or power to create or to destroy. All is in the hands of the one Mind, even God. The first statement about evil, and the first suggestion of more than the one Mind, is in the fable of the serpent. The facts of creation, as previously recorded, include nothing of the kind.

The serpent is supposed to say, “Ye shall be as gods!” but these gods must be evolved from materiality, and be

the very antipodes of immortal and spiritual Being. Man is the likeness of Spirit, but a material personality is not this likeness. Therefore man, in this allegory, is neither a lower god, nor the image and likeness of the one God.