What is basic is a question of causation. The riddle of the ages is the supposition of material causation with its consequent material effects and laws—its Adam man, its rib woman, and the loss of harmonious being. Failing to comprehend the metaphysical meaning of the Scriptural teaching that God is the only cause and creator and that God is Spirit, the infinite all-inclusive Mind, humanity continues to be mystified by a material sphinx. But the riddle is unsolvable only so long as the individual fails to perceive that human existence is, in its totality, an enigma, and learns that reality is found in spiritual living.
Spiritual living is nothing more or less than living in accordance with the unchanging spiritual teaching of Christ Jesus as set forth in the New Testament and applied in Christian Science. Religious philosophies, however, schools of medicine and mental healing, social and political systems, and systems of academic and scientific education, in so far as they are based on the belief in matter or mind originating in matter as cause, reality, and substance, and cling to manmade laws, are riddles complicated by constant flux in which yesterday's heterodoxy becomes to-day's orthodoxy, only to be found on the morrow relegated to the discard.
The poet Gray pictured an open grave awaiting material efforts and systems when he wrote in his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":—
