Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/404

388 The Christian martyrs were prophets of Christian Science. Through the uplifting and consecrating power of divine Truth, they obtained a victory over the corporeal senses, a victory which Science alone can explain. Stolidity, which is a resisting state of mortal mind, suffers less, only because it knows less of material law.

The Apostle John testified to the divine basis of Christian Science, when dire inflictions failed to destroy his body. Idolaters, believing in more than one mind, had “gods many,” and thought that they could kill the body with matter, independently of mind.

Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and there follows the necessity for another

admission in the opposite direction, — that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity. This is a specimen of the ambiguous nature of all material is health-theories. They are self-contradictory and self-destructive, constituting a “kingdom divided against itself,” which is “brought to desolation.” If food was prepared by Jesus for his disciples, it cannot destroy life.

The fact is, food does not affect the absolute Life of man, and this becomes self-evident, when we learn that

God is our Life. Because sin and sickness are not qualities of Soul, or Life, we have hope in immortality; but it would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating until we gain perfection and a clear comprehension of the living Spirit. In that perfect day of understanding, we shall neither eat to live nor live to eat.

If mortals think that food disturbs the harmonious functions of mind and body, either the food or this thought