Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/87

Rh poise who is so carried away with the exhilaration of the sensation as to imagine that he will never need to set foot on the ground again. A spirituality that makes indiscriminate and wholesale war upon the body is a spirituality that is pagan and not Christian. The Bible does no such thing as this.

Of course Mrs. Eddy is against the resurrection of the body, as will be seen later. For the soul to re-enter the body is for it to come again into its opposite. It is light clothed with or hidden in darkness. Christ's ascension was a discarding and an abandoning of the “mortal coil.” Matter is a negation or limitation of the spirit. In proportion as one escapes from the body he becomes free. To get away from it entirely is to be where all is light and where there is no darkness at all. It was impossible therefore for Mrs. Eddy to believe in or desire the resurrection of the body. Some of her followers when she died did not seem to understand this and declared that they expected her resurrection. But the reappearance of Mrs. Eddy in the flesh, in finiteness, in unreality, in shadow, in falsity, and darkness would have spoiled all her teaching. In this case certainly “the last error would be worse than the first.”

It was the contrary with Jesus Christ. He taught that death is a reality which he could conquer and demonstrated the truth of his words by his death and resurrection. Mrs. Eddy taught that death is an unreality that could be avoided