The teaching of Christian Science that the physical senses, so-called, cannot give reliable testimony in relation to God or man is, perhaps, more sharply criticised by the material thought than any other teaching in human history. Yet to trust what appears to these senses true causation, is to repudiate the most important wisdom of the past and present. To these senses, the sky and ocean meet; the surface of the earth which is near and that of the sun which is so distant seem flat; the body remains on the planet by reason of its own inherent ponderosity; the blood to be at rest, and the weight of the earth within itself, independent of every other body. These and many other instances which will quickly recur to every thinker, show the faulty results of relying on sense appearances, for we know that in many things the truth is the very opposite of what appears to be true. That which offers in one instance a correct explanation of the perversion of facts by the senses, unlocks the mystery in all. We now know that sky and ocean seem to meet solely because of the limitation of physical sight. This sense of sight is no more limited than the other senses, and no more limited in one instance than in another, and if in many instances the fact is so opposite to what appears, is it not reasonable to infer this to be the case in the entire round of physical sense testimony? Enlightened and advancing reason coming to the rescue will discover and utilize the law of Mind whereby the thraldom of sense experience may, in the coming time, be dominated by us as it was by the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, and absolute truth thereby attained. If sense testimony is reliable, individual immortality is a delusion. Even the doubt of individual continuity beyond the grave, so widely abroad in consciousness, is the prolific soil of crime, and whatever propagates or sustains evil has no element of truth or good in it.
The most labored and learned efforts have been to prove the individual immortality of man from the basis of matter and material law, and in this mystic travel from the material atom up to spiritual immortal man, some of the most startling and bewildering inconsistencies have been presented.
Sense testimony and experience has been accepted as reliable until man is in the grave, then the statement of Paul that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned" has been adopted. Indeed, this passage has actually been quoted to refute the theory which brought man to the experience of death. Attempts have thus been made to dispense with the testimony of the physical senses, while pursuing the theory that a point had been reached where these physical senses become incompetent to testify longer, both a new basis and a new process of reasoning being demanded. The pitiable plight of great and good men trying to reach a correct conclusion from a fundamentally false premise has rarely if ever been more clearly illustrated than in this endeavor. Christian philosophy has irresistibly led men to recognize the great fact, that "Knowing is life." Now knowing is certainly a quality of mind, and hence that cannot be accepted as life, or a medium of life, which does not have a gleam of mind or intelligence. If these writers had abandoned their material theory and basis at the very beginning, and had used from start to finish the Pauline explanation of Truth, their work might have withstood the crucible of time. Even now thinkers see that so long as a material atom is supposed to exist, its division is likewise suppositional, and that a divisible entity cannot be elemental life or its medium of development. Any argument that requires midway, an absolute change of base in order to complete and round its original proposition, cannot long satisfy an age when continuity of law and purpose is inexorably demanded. The world is rapidly entering a period of scientific scholarship which is altogether too broad to build its foundations on the infinitesimal atom. The Word of God spoken through Christ Jesus is developing in human consciousness an intelligence which refuses longer to recognize the egg or bivalve as its origin. As this intelligence looks higher and wiser for source and supply, its strides awaken amazement in those slumbering in the fossil theories of either non-intelligent matter, or embryonic mind as the basis of development into divine possibilities. That the law of development must or could at any point take a sudden change, upsets every rule of safe and reasonable calculation and leaves us on the turbulent sea of confusion and doubt, without a rudder or compass. The deduction from Scripture that God governs one part of His universe through spiritual law and another part through the opposite material law, constitutes such a blight on the consistent integrity of divine law, that thinkers have been compelled either to live in the dark shadow of infidelity, or to resort to studied and unnatural arguments in order to hold thought under the dominion of this belief in a divided kingdom.
