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244 good and the fount of all being, He does not produce moral or physical deformity; therefore such deformity is

not real, but is illusion, the mirage of error. Divine Science reveals these grand facts. On their basis Jesus demonstrated Life, never fearing nor obeying error in any form.

If we were to derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness would have no abiding-place in man, and the worms would rob him of the flesh; but Paul writes: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

Man undergoing birth, maturity, and decay is like the beasts and vegetables, — subject to laws of decay. If

man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but man was never more nor less than man.

If man flickers out in death or springs from matter into being, there must be an instant when God is without His entire manifestation, — when there is no full reflection of the infinite Mind.

Man in Science is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor death. He is not a beast, a vegetable,

nor a migratory mind. He does not pass from matter to Mind, from the mortal to the immortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions cast us headlong into darkness and dogma. Even Shakespeare's poetry pictures age as infancy, as helplessness and decadence, instead of assigning to man the everlasting grandeur and immortality of development, power, and prestige.