Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/135

Rh When we endow matter with vague spiritual power, — that is, when we do so in our theories, for of course we

cannot really endow matter with what it does not and cannot possess, — we disown the Almighty, for such theories lead to one of two things. They either presuppose the self-evolution and self-government of matter, or else they assume that matter is the product of Spirit. To seize the first horn of this dilemma and consider matter as a power in and of itself, is to leave the creator out of His own universe; while to grasp the other horn of the dilemma and regard God as the creator of matter, is not only to make Him responsible for all disasters, physical and moral, but to announce Him as their source, thereby making Him guilty of maintaining perpetual misrule in the form and under the name of natural law.

In one sense God is identical with nature, but this nature is spiritual and is not expressed in matter. The

lawgiver, whose lightning palsies or prostrates in death the child at prayer, is not the divine ideal of omnipresent Love. God is natural good, and is represented only by the idea of goodness; while evil should be regarded as unnatural, because it is opposed to the nature of Spirit, God.

In viewing the sunrise, one finds that it contradicts the evidence before the senses to believe that the earth

is in motion and the sun at rest. As astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar system, so Christian Science reverses the seeming relation of Soul and body and makes so body tributary to Mind. Thus it is with man, who is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it