Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/94

86 of the time-serving saying of their half-brother, Ralph Waldo Emerson, namely, that “with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” To make it clear how foreign to Christianity is the relation of soul and body, which we have been reviewing, let the student consider that the conception of the body as the prison-house of the soul is not found in the Bible at all. It is a pagan notion. Preachers who proclaim this vagary ought to “sit up and take notice”. The Bible teaches the redemption and resurrection of the body and our eternal existence in it; not escape from it.

The testing of a principle is the proving or disproving of its truth and value. If the principle of the unreality of matter cannot be applied to one department of practical life as well as another, then it is not true and should be rejected. We may say of Mrs. Eddy, as was humorously said of Bishop Berkeley, that when she says there is no matter, it's no matter what she says. The material world is “real as long as it lasts”, as Bob Burdette wittily puts it.

In an idealistic system, a system that confines reality to the divine mind and its ideas, it is natural and necessary that mind be considered as the creator of the world. And so Mrs. Eddy and the Neoplatonists teach.

Two supposit i ons which will be discussed at a proper time should for the present be kept in