Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/146

118 My soul thanks the loyal, royal natures of the beloved members of my church who cheerfully obey God and steadily go on promoting the true Principle of Christian Science. Only the disobedient spread personal contagion, and any imaginary benefit they receive is the effect of self-mesmerism, wherein the remedy is worse than the disease.

My Dear Sir: — I beg to thank you for your most excellent letter. It is an outpouring of goodness and greatness with which you honor me.

In a call upon my person, you would not see me, for spiritual sense demands and commands us; hence I seek to be “absent from the body,” and such circumstances embarrass the higher criticism.

The Scripture reads: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” A saving faith comes not of a person, but of Truth's presence and power. Soul, not sense, receives and gives it. One's voluntary withdrawal from society, from furnishing the demands upon the finite to supply the blessings of the infinite, — something impossible in the Science of God and credited only by human belief, by a material and not by the spiritual sense of man, — should come from conscience.

The doctrine of Buddha, which rests on a heathen basis for its Nirvana, represents not the divinity of Christian Science, in which Truth, or Christ, finds its paradise in Spirit, in the consciousness of heaven within us — health, harmony, holiness, entirely apart from limitations, which would dwarf individuality in personality and couple evil