"And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last man Adam was made a quickening spirit."—
I Cor. 15: 45.
The apostle, when reasoning with the Corinthian brethren, spake first from their standpoint of material creation; and is not giving the history of spiritual man, whose origin is Spirit, even the eternal Us, who said, "Let us make man." The origin material, in which Soul, Mind, is supposed to enter the embryo man after his birth, was the Adam, or self-constituted belief of a material man that he referred to. This material belief has fallen far below the original statement of man in the image and likeness of God. It separates man from God, and would climax in the opposite of immortal man, namely, a sick and sinning mortal. We learn of divine science, that God is the Father of man, and God is Love; hence Love is the divine Principle of the divine, ideal man, the spiritual Principle of spiritual man. Now let us not lose the science of that man, but regain it more clearly, and learn that man cannot be separated from God, insomuch as the idea cannot be torn apart from its principle that reproduces it in proof of its immortality, and never produces it less perfect than at first. A material sense of existence is not the truth of being, and no proof of it. A spiritual sense of God and man is the only right sense of them.
The apostle Paul refers to the last Adam as the Messias, our blessed Master, whose interpretation of God and man, restored to mortal sense somewhat of the lost sense of perfection, or the likeness of God, and restored it through the spiritual regeneration of mind and body—by casting out devils, errors, healing the sick; and restoring the spiritual sense of man as immortal instead of mortal, made him the victor over death and the grave. Our Master was the great metaphysician, who wrought over and above every sense of matter into the higher sense of the possibilities of Spirit, and established man's spiritual harmony as the reality of his being. Discord, the opposite unreality, shows us that spiritual man alone is eternal, and the so-called material man but temporal. This is shown, even as a chord is seen the reality of music, and a discord its unreality.
