In declaring God to be Principle and not person,— a non-natural being, residing somewhere in space, and from His throne above governing all things, and issuing daily and hourly to man, through the medium of material sense, His edicts of good and evil, productive alike of punishments and rewards, sorrows and joys, sin and sickness, life and death,—Christian Science declares a truth which is not only self-evident, but is corroborated and proven by the teachings of Christ and the Scriptures throughout. The belief that good and evil emanate from the same source is, like all man-made doctrines, false and misleading. It is but another name for Pantheism, and is born of material reasoning. It is the province, seemingly, of human knowledge to cloud and mystify everything pertaining to Mind, and its creations, as evidenced by the untiring but misguided efforts of the many learned scientific schools, in their vain endeavor to trace out a natural origin for all things. Thus striving to remove man farther and farther from the natural, spiritual Source of his being. It is but a further proof that, to so-called mortal or finite mind, God, the Infinite Spirit or Divine Principle, and its creations, is, and ever will be incomprehensible. " In Spirit and in Truth " must our search be, if we would find the origin of our being, where, in the realm of harmony and Love, abideth forever all that is real, perfect and eternal. Christ hath "set before us the open door and no man can shut it." We are not left to the false and discomforting beliefs of our learned but deluded fellow men, who " have made a covenant with their eyes to belittle Deity," and who would add to the long catalogue of material falsities the new doctrine: "Man, the sequence of Monkey evolution,"—the imperfect creation of an imperfect creator; but we have before us Christian Science, the truth of Holy Writ, and Divine Revelation; which not only opens up to us the All-perfect Creator, and our own spiritual and perfect origin, but forecasts the awakening out of this erring dream of material sense, of disease and decay, into the reality of that spiritual existence, that oneness with Christ, where all is eternal Love and harmony, and where error and discord have no place. We find that all that is pure, perfect, good and true, spring from an outward, spiritual intuition, "the not-ourselves that makes for righteousness," and which, if cultivated in Spirit and in Truth, lead us to that faith, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen;" while all that is imperfect, erring, decaying, dying, is conveyed through material sense alone, a "belief of Life, Substance and Intelligence in matter, the opposite of Spirit, the inversion of Divine Principle." " In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,"—"created man in His own image and after His likeness, male and female created He them, and gave them dominion over all the earth." He made all that was made, and all that He made was "good." Man, thererore, is God's highest idea, or thought, expressed. He is spiritual, being the offspring of Spirit. He is in the image and likeness of God, in that, as God's grandest object of thought, he reflects Divine Principle, in which alone he lives, moves and has his being; and through reflection, partakes of all of the character and attributes of his Creator. God being all-perfect, immortal and eternal, man, too, must be so; as he has, and can have no existence apart from the Mind which created him, for " the Word is with God, and the Word is God."
Man, made in the image and likeness of God does not prove Deity to be a person or non-natural man, any more than the reflected thoughts on canvas of Bonheur, the celebrated animal painter, could prove that artist to be a horse or an ox.
All that is pure and perfect is real, is spiritual and immortal, and reflects Divine Principle. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time; so cannot good and evil, Life, Love and Truth with their opposites in sickness and death, occupy the same Mind. To say that error, as reflected in mortals, really exists and is a truth, is to acknowledge it a creation of God, and thereby make good and evil alike objects of thought in the Mind of Deity; which, if true, evil as well as good, error as well as Truth, would be immortal and eternal, and God the Father of all, proven to be an erring, changeable and discordant being, like unto mortals, destroying all hope of future peace, health, harmony and rest for the sick and the sinning. To the humble and earnest " worshippers [workers] in Spirit and in Truth," the falsity of such belief is more apparent. God, to them, is the All-perfect Father and Creator, the immutable and unerring Principle of Love and Truth. They, "having eyes," see that only that which is good and perfect belong to Him— that Truth and not error reveals Him. He never created aught to punish or destroy, for he could not. Hence, matter, with all its accompanying beliefs of error, as manifested through material sense, is a delusion—the distorted shadow of Spirit, which is the true and only substance. In belief alone does error exist, and the belief is the existence. The belief and believer are one,—"A liar and the father of it—a murderer from the beginning," saith the Lord.
