Men give counsel, but they give not the wisdom to profit by it. To ask wisdom of God is the beginning of wisdom.
Meekness moderating human vanity inspires wisdom and procures divine power; so when alone we have our thoughts to watch, in our families our tempers, and in society our tongues. Human lives are yet uncarved, in the rough marble, encumbered with crude, rude fragments, and awaiting the hammering, chisseling and transfiguration from His hand.
Great only as good, because fashioned divinely, were those unpretentious and colossal characters Paul and Jesus. Theirs were modes of Mind cast in the moulds of Christian Science; Paul's by the supremely natural transforming power of Truth, and Jesus' by his original scientific sonship with God. Philosophy has never produced, nor can it reproduce, these stars of the first magnitude—fixed stars in the heavens of Soul. When shall earth be crowned with the true knowledge of Christ?
When Christian Science has melted away its cloud of false witnesses, and the dews of divine grace, falling upon the blighted flowers of feeling, shall lift every leaflet spiritward, and "Israel after the flesh," who partaketh of their own altars, shall be no more; then "Israel according to the Spirit" shall fill earth with the divine energies, understanding, and overflowing tides of spiritual sensation and consciousness.
When mortal mind is silenced by the still small voice of Truth that regenerates philosophy and logic, and Jesus as the true idea of Him, is heard as of yore, saying to itching ears and dull disciples, "I and the Father are one," "Before Abraham was, I am"—co-existent and co-eternal with God, and this idea is understood, then will the earth be filled with the true knowledge of Christ. No advancing modes of human mind made Jesus; rather was it their subjugation in the mind of the virgin Mother.
When the belief in material form, mortal mind, sensual conception, dissolves through self-imposed suffering, and its substances are found substanceless, then its miscalled life ends in death, and death itself is swallowed up in Life—Spiritual Life—whose myriad forms are neither matter nor mortal mind.
When every form and mode of evil disappear to human thought, and mollusk and radiate are spiritual concepts witnessing to one Creator—then earth is full of His glory—and Christian Science has overshadowed all human philosophy—and being is understood in startling contradiction of human hypotheses,—and Socrates, Plato, Kant, Locke, Berkely, Tyndall, Darwin and Spencer shall sit at the feet of Jesus.
To this great end Paul admonisheth, that we "lay aside every weight, and the sin that doth so easily beset us, and run with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus as the author and finisher of our faith." So shall mortals soar to final freedom and rest from the subtlety of human wisdom and human woe.
God is the only Mind and Father of all, and only the spiritual universe and man, and their eternal individualities, are His own image and likeness. God, the only substance and divine Principle of creation, is by no means a creative partner in the firm of error named matter, or mortal mind. He eliminates His own idea wherein Principle and idea are not one—or God and man are one—and who could say which that one was?
"His ways are not as our ways." The Divine modes and manifestations are not those of the material senses; e.g. intelligent matter, or mortal mind, material birth, growth and decay. They are the forever-existing realities of Divine Science; wherein God and man are perfect, and man's reason is at rest in God's wisdom, who comprehends and reflects all real mode, form, individuality, identity.
Blind theology has led the blind; Christ's logos gives sight to these blind, ears to these deaf, feet to these lame— physically, morally, spiritually. Theologians make the mortal mistake to believe that God, having made all, made evil; but the scriptures declare that all that he made was good. Then, was evil part and parcel of good?
Philosophy vaguely hypothesizing creation as its own Creator, puts cause into effect, and out of nothing it would create something, whose noumenon is mind, and phenomenon matter!—an evil mind, whose modes are material manifestations of evil, and that continually, until self-extinguished by suffering.
Here revelation must come to the rescue of mortals to remove this mental millstone that is dragging them downward, and refute erring reasons with the spiritual Cosmos and Science of Soul. We all must find shelter from the storm and tempest in the tabernacle of Spirit. Truth is won through Science, or suffering; O vain mortals, which shall it be? And suffering has no reward, only when it is necessary to avoid guilt or fulfil goodness. And pleasure is no crime, only when it strengthens the influence of bad inclinations, or lessens the activities of virtue. The more nearly an erring so-called mind approaches purity, the more conscious it becomes of its own unreality, and the great reality of Divine Mind and true happiness.
The ego that claims selfhood in error and passes from molecule and monkey up to man, is no ego, but simply the supposition that the absence of good is mind and men; when its greatest flatterer, identification, is piqued by Him who compensateth vanity with nothingness,—dust with dust.
The mythology of evil and mortality is the material mode of a suppositional mind; while the immortal modes of Mind are spiritual, and they pass through none of the changes of matter, or evil. Truth said, said from the beginning, "Let us (Spirit) make man perfect," and there is no other Maker, and a perfect man would not desire to make himself imperfect. These modes declare the beauty of holiness, and that His manifold wisdom shines through the visible world in glimpses of the eternal verities. Even through the mists of mortality is seen the brightness of His coming.
We must avoid the shoals of a sensual religion, or philosophy, that misguides reason and affection, and hold fast to Christian Science as the Word that is God, Spirit and Truth. This word corrects the philosopher, confutes the astronomer, exposes the subtle sophist, and drives diviners mad. The Bible is the learned man's masterpiece, the ignorant man's dictionary, the wise man's directory.
I foresee and foresay, that every advancing epoch of Truth will be characterized by more spiritual apprehension of the Scriptures, that will show their marked consonance with the text-book of Christian Science Mind-healing. Should interpreting the Word in this "new tongue," whereby the sick are healed, evoke new persecutions and anathemas from the sensual world of letters, wait patiently on the Lord and He will renew your strength. But in return for individual enemies, what a recompense, to have healed, through Christ, the sick and sinner, made the public your friend, and posterity your familiar.
