Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/336

320 when he said, “God is love.” Likewise we can speak of the truth of Truth and of the life of Life, for Christ plainly declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Metaphors abound in the Bible, and names are often expressive of spiritual ideas. The most distinguished

theologians in Europe and America agree that the Scriptures have both a spiritual and literal meaning. In Smith's Bible Dictionary it is said: “The spiritual interpretation of Scripture must rest upon both the literal and moral;” and in the learned article on Noah in the same work, the familiar text, Genesis vi. 3, “And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh,” is quoted as follows, from the original Hebrew: “And Jehovah said, My spirit shall not forever rule [or be humbled] in men, seeing that they are [or, in their error they are] but flesh.” Here the original text declares plainly the spiritual fact of being, even man's eternal and harmonious existence as image, idea, instead of matter (however transcendental such a thought appears), and avers that this fact is not forever to be humbled by the belief that man is flesh and matter, for according to that error man is mortal.

The one important interpretation of Scripture is the spiritual. For example, the text, “In my flesh shall I

see God,” gives a profound idea of the divine power to heal the ills of the flesh, and encourages mortals to hope in Him who healeth all our diseases; whereas this passage is continually quoted as if Job intended to declare that even if disease and worms destroyed his body, yet in the latter days he should stand in celestial perfection before Elohim, still clad