AN attempt to mix Spirit and matter in religious teaching has marked the religious history of the centuries. The church has formulated as its basic statement one God, one creator or cause, the infinite Spirit. It has then said that matter is an effect of the one cause, and to avoid the illogical deduction of two opposite effects from one cause, it has declared that in some inexplicable and unknowable way Spirit has been expressed through or has developed into its opposite, matter. Many have been willing to concede to matter a very small arc in the theoretical circle which begins with Spirit, goes into matter, and returns to Spirit, but the admission of this modicum of matter, betraying a failure to apprehend the origin and ultimate which constitute the circle of being, vitiates the circle.
The words "Spirit" and "matter" indicate opposites, and it is generally admitted that force cannot be expressed in its opposite. The belief that this rule has been violated, and that Spirit has developed into or has been expressed in its opposite, matter, has relegated Spirit and spiritual activities, in belief, to the domain of the mysterious and the supernatural. In the light of a great spiritual illumination Mrs. Eddy perceived that there is no possible divorcement between true science and true religion, and that matter has no place in the circle of being, and she gave to the world the undivided garment, Christian Science. In Science and Health (p. 279) she makes this clear-cut statement: "Spirit and matter can neither coexist nor cooperate, and one can no more create the other than Truth can create error."
Christian Science reveals the fact that the statements of the "great First Cause," or God, as one, and as omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, are not arbitrary statements or articles of faith, but are scientific necessities. The perception of the omnipresence of Spirit excludes the thought of any entity to what is called matter and reveals it as only a false sense of the effects of an omnipresent cause. The understanding of God as omniscient Mind reveals the fact that the ideas which are the expression of this infinite Mind constitute the real universe, all that is; and that, this Mind remaining one and constant, each individual idea must forever continue one and inviolate. The failure of what is called the human mind to maintain any oneness of idea is the proof of its finiteness; its divisibility is expressed in sin, disease, and death.
