I had studied Mrs. Eddy's work, Science and Health, and rejoiced at the prospect of freedom and harmony in store for the mothers of our land, when its teaching should be wider promulgated. I had taken a course of instruction from her whose students—now scattered throughout the Union, in great and increasing numbers regard as a Mother sent from heaven, and chosen to personify that character in all its unselfish love, unchanging devotion, and unceasing care and labor for suffering humanity.
Christian Science had freed me from a belief of inherited dyspepsia and constipation, and from a discouraged and weakened condition, resulting from a period of illness at the birth and death of an infant boy, three years before. Christian Science had taught me that mortal conception, birth, growth, and decay are all delusions, resulting from a finite sense of existence, which the Truth of Being ignores. I had also learned that in Spirit, existing eternally, dwells the true idea or image of the Infinite God, perfect and free,—God, the one and only Father of all, omnipotent, omnipresent, the one Intelligence, one Life, one Love, one Truth, one Mind.
It became clear to me that mortal parentage is but a fleeting, flickering sense, untrue, unreal, and therefore valueless, and should thus be regarded. Jesus said: "My kingdom is not of this world,"—meaning the material sense of life. Certainly he lived this doctrine in action; for he demonstrated the unreality and powerlessness of the flesh, or anything material, in every instance, on sea and on land, rendering to Cæsar the carnal things that belong to Cæsar, and to God all might, majesty, and things eternal. I learned that evil (personified into Devil) is only the absence of Good and Truth, and is a lie, as Jesus said; for Truth and Goodness are never absent, being eternal. In this lie (Devil) dwells every phase of discord, fear, sorrow, sin, and death. Infinite in number and variety as the ideas of Truth, they then stand for nothing, being only a negation. All error is in the negative, and may be known by its mortality; while Truth is always positive, pure, and immortal.
