Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/248

206 is, for the present, an incontrovertible fact. "Contemplating a corpse," she wrote, "we behold the going out of a belief." One might conclude, from Mrs. Glover's reasoning, that a "corpse" might be exactly that "immortal" and "sensationless" body which belongs to Spirit. The belief of Life in matter has "gone out." It is as "sensationless" as it is possible to be. Yet the all-powerful and all-pervading Principle, of which she said so many things, never quickens a "corpse" nor works its wonders through the dead.

But in spite of her statement that death is "the going out of a belief," Mrs. Glover said in another passage: "If the change called death dispossessed man of the belief of pleasure and pain in the body, universal happiness were secure at the moment of dissolution; but this is not so; every sin and every error we possess at the moment of death remains after it the same as before, and our only redemption is in God, the Principle of man, that destroys the belief of intelligent bodies."

The system seems altogether hopeless if one attempts to follow Mrs. Glover's reasoning. If a mortal man's belief in material life continues even after his mortal and material life is dissolved, it being all the time understood that "belief," "material life," and "mortal man" are one and the same, then what chance has man to become separated from his belief in himself? Mrs. Glover had a suspicion that all this was confusing and tried to help it out. "From the sudden surprise," she wrote, "of finding all that is mortal unreal, . . . the question arises, who or what is it that believes?"

"God is the only Intelligence, and can not believe because He understands. . . . Intelligence is Soul and not sense, Spirit