Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/566

544 decay, in order to propagate its species, and the resulting germ is doomed to the same routine.

The ancient and hypothetical question as to which is first, the egg or the bird, is answered, if the egg

produces the parent. But we cannot stop here. Another question follows: Who or what produces the parent of the egg? That the earth was hatched from the Egg of Night was once an accepted theory. Heathen philosophy, modern geology, and all other material hypotheses, deal with causation as contingent on matter, and as necessarily apparent to the corporeal senses, even where the proof requisite to sustain this assumption is undiscovered. Mortal theories make friends of sin, sickness, and death; whereas the spiritual facts of existence include neither member of this dolorous and fatal triad.

Human experience in mortal life, starting from an egg, corresponds with that of Job, when he says, “Man

is of few days and full of trouble.” Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck their shells open with Christian Science, and look upward. Thought, loosened from a material basis, but not yet instructed by Science, may become wild with freedom, and so be self-contradictory.

From a material source flows no remedy for sorrow, sin, and death; for the redeeming power, from the ills

they occasion, is not in egg or dust. The blending tints of leaf and flower show the order of matter to be the order of mortal mind. The intermixture of different species, urged to its utmost limits, results in a return to the original species. Thus