Science & Health - Key to the Scriptures. Mary Baker Eddy

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      CHAPTER II.

       FOOTSTEPS OF TRUTH.

       Table of Contents

      And thy best reason for aught is this, — thou, Lord, wouldst have it so. — Tupper.

      The best sermon ever preached is Truth's practice, healing sickness and destroying sin. Knowing that one affection will be supreme in us, and take the lead of our lives, the Master said, “Ye cannot serve two masters.”

      Christian Science must be accepted, at this period, by induction. We admit the whole because a part is proven, and that part illustrates and proves the entire Principle. The Science should be taught by one morally advanced and spiritually endowed, for it is not superficial, nor is it seen from the standpoint of the human senses. Only by the illumination of the spiritual sense can the light of understanding be thrown upon this Science, that reverses the evidence before the material senses, and furnishes the right interpretation of God and man.

      Although this volume contains the whole Science of Mind-healing, never think that you can gather its entire meaning by simply perusing my text-book. My personal instructions plant you more gently on its spiritual basis, and lift you more firmly above the perishing fossils of old beliefs, that you may grasp the far-off and unattained.

      We must tear down before we can build; and demolishing, rather than building, belongs to the work of teaching new truths. I have endeavored to make this work the Æsculapius of Mind, that it may give hope to the sick, and heal them, although they know not how. This is the effect of Truth, even when not wholly understood.

      Mental Science was a new revelation to myself when, teaching its grand truths, I had (along with them) to impart also the hue of spiritual ideas from my own spiritual condition, and do this through the meagre channel afforded by language. The Truth makes a new creation, whereby old things pass away and “all things become new.” Passions, selfishness, appetites, — all sensuality, — yield to spirituality, and the superabundance of being is on the side of God. Christian perfection is won on no other basis. The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God's will be universally done.

      If they would bring to bear upon the study of the Science of Mind half the faith they have in the so-called pains and pleasures of material sense, men would not go on from immorality to immorality, until disciplined by the prison and the scaffold, but the whole human family would be redeemed by the merits of Christ. For this glorious result Jesus strove, that man might be blessed by Divine knowing.

      Outside of this Science all is unstable error; but, when in accord with the Principle of his being, man neither sins nor suffers. The days of our earthly pilgrimage should multiply instead of diminish; this travelling should be towards life instead of death; and as we journey, we should develop more and more the infinite capacities of humanity, which endow it with the supreme control of the earth.

      Grafting holiness upon unholiness, and opining that sin is forgiven when it is not destroyed, is as foolish as straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Our beliefs about a Supreme Being, and the practice growing out of them, are contradictory. We admit that God hath almighty power, is a “present help in time of trouble,” and yet we rely on a drug to heal disease, as if senseless matter had more power than sensible Spirit.

      Common opinion admits that a man may take cold in the act of doing good, that evil can trespass on Love's domain. The Science of Christianity endows Spirit with omnipotence, assigns rewards to righteousness, and denies that matter can create or destroy.

      Error abounds where truth should much more abound. If God were understood, instead of merely believed, this faith would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He maketh himself as God,” was the justification of Christ, for to the Christian there is no other self than God. This thought incites the more exalted worship of self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of being, and destroys reliance on aught but God, so making man the image of his Maker in deed and in Truth.

      We are prone to believe either in more than one Supreme Ruler, or in some power less than God. We imagine that Mind can be imprisoned in a sensuous body. We try to believe, when the body (in God's keeping) has gone to ruin, overmastered omnipotence, and destroyed itself, that then the deathless Principle or Soul may escape from it.

      But God has no need to kill a man in order to draw him to Himself, for God Himself is the Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of being. The good we think and do, the СКАЧАТЬ