Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/301

Rh Matter is not sentient and cannot be cognizant of good or of evil, of pleasure or of pain. Man's individuality is not material. This Science of being obtains not alone hereafter in what men call Paradise, but here and now; it is the great fact of being for time and eternity.

What, then, is the material personality which suffers, sins, and dies? It is not man, the image and likeness

of God, but man's counterfeit, the inverted likeness, the unlikeness called sin, sickness, and death. The unreality of the claim that a mortal is the true image of God is illustrated by the opposite natures of Spirit and matter, Mind and body, for one is intelligence while the other is non-intelligence.

Is God a physical personality? Spirit is not physical. The belief that a material body is man is a false

conception of man. The time has come for a finite conception of the infinite and of a material body as the seat of Mind to give place to a diviner sense of intelligence and its manifestations, — to the better understanding that Science gives of the Supreme Being, or divine Principle, and idea.

By interpreting God as a corporeal Saviour but not as the saving Principle, or divine Love, we shall continue

to seek salvation through pardon and not through reform, and resort to matter instead of Spirit for the cure of the sick. As mortals reach, through knowledge of Christian Science, a higher sense, they will seek to learn, not from matter, but from the divine Principle, God, how to demonstrate the Christ, Truth, as the healing and saving power.

It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what