Mary Baker Eddy

“ To him, Life was Spirit.
Truth, defiant of error or matter, is Science, dispelling a false sense and leading man into the true sense of selfhood and Godhood; wherein the mortal does not develop the immortal, nor the material the spiritual, but wherein true manhood and womanhood go forth in the radiance of eternal being and its perfections, unchanged and unchangeable.
This generation seems too material for any strong demonstration over death, and hence cannot bring out the infinite reality of Life,—namely, that there is no death, but only Life. ”

“ Would it not absurdly follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil necessarily leads to extinction? Rather let us think of God as saying, I am infinite good; therefore I know not evil. Dwelling in light, I can see only the brightness of My own glory.
Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and sees it not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy everything that is unlike Myself. ”

“ I believe that of which I am conscious through the understanding, however faintly able to demonstrate Truth and Love.
Do you believe in man?
I believe in the individual man, for I understand that man is as definite and eternal as God, and that man is coexistent with God, as being the eternally divine idea. This is demonstrable by the simple appeal to human consciousness.
But I believe less in the sinner, wrongly named man. The more I understand true humanhood, the more I see it to be sinless,—as ignorant of sin as is the perfect Maker. ”

“ To me the reality and substance of being are good, and nothing else. Through the eternal reality of existence I reach, in thought, a glorified consciousness of the only living God and the genuine man. So long as I hold evil in consciousness, I cannot be wholly good.
You cannot simultaneously serve the mammon of materiality and the God of spirituality. There are not two realities of being, two opposite states of existence. One should appear real to us, and the other unreal, or we lose the Science of being. ”

“ This Science of God and man is the Holy Ghost, which reveals and sustains the unbroken and eternal harmony of both God and the universe. It is the kingdom of heaven, the ever-present reign of harmony, already with us. Hence the need that human consciousness should become divine, in the coincidence of God and man, in contradistinction to the false consciousness of both good and evil, God and devil,—of man separated from his Maker. ”

“ Jesus came to rescue men from these very illusions to which he seemed to conform: from the illusion which calls sin real, and man a sinner, needing a Saviour; the illusion which calls sickness real, and man an invalid, needing a physician; the illusion that death is as real as Life. From such thoughts—mortal inventions, one and all—Christ Jesus came to save men, through ever-present and eternal good. ”

“ The less consciousness of evil or matter mortals have, the easier it is for them to evade sin, sickness, and death,—which are but states of false belief,—and awake from the troubled dream, a consciousness which is without Mind or Maker.
Matter and evil cannot be conscious, and consciousness should not be evil. Adopt this rule of Science, and you will discover the material origin, growth, maturity, and death of sinners, as the history of man, disappears, and the everlasting facts of being appear, wherein man is the reflection of immutable good. ”

“ Soul, Spirit, is deathless. Matter, sin, and death are not the outcome of Spirit, holiness, and Life. What then are matter, sin, and death? They can be nothing except the results of material consciousness; but material consciousness can have no real existence, because it is not a living—that is to say, a divine and intelligent—reality.
That man must be vicious before he can be virtuous, dying before he can be deathless, material before he can be spiritual, is an error of the senses; for the very opposite of this error is the genuine Science of being. ”

“ If He is All, He can have no consciousness of anything unlike Himself; because, if He is omnipresent, there can be nothing outside of Himself.
Now this self-same God is our helper. He pities us. He has mercy upon us, and guides every event of our careers. He is near to them who adore Him. To understand Him, without a single taint of our mortal, finite sense of sin, sickness, or death, is to approach Him and become like Him.
Truth is God, and in God's law. This law declares that Truth is All, and there is no error. This law of Truth destroys every phase of error. ”

“ The material senses testify falsely. They presuppose that God is good and that man is evil, that Deity is deathless, but that man dies, losing the divine likeness.
Science and material sense conflict at all points, from the revolution of the earth to the fall of a sparrow. It is mortality only that dies.
To say that you and I, as mortals, will not enter this dark shadow of material sense, called death, is to assert what we have not proved; but man in Science never dies. Material sense, or the belief of life in matter, must perish, in order to prove man deathless. ”

“ The bright gold of Truth is dimmed by the doctrine of mind in matter.
To say there is a false claim, called sickness, is to admit all there is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim. To be healed, one must lose sight of a false claim. If the claim be present to the thought, then disease becomes as tangible as any reality. To regard sickness as a false claim, is to abate the fear of it ”

“ What is in eternal Mind must be reflected in man, Mind's image. How then could man escape, or hope to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his creator?
God never said that man would become better by learning to distinguish evil from good,—but the contrary, that by this knowledge, by man's first disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our woe."
"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely cognizant of sin? ”

“ Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so must man, or the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.
If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature is punished for his likeness to his creator.
God is commonly called the sinless, and man the sinful; but if the thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless? Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and human sin become only an echo of the divine? ”

“ Then God and heaven, or Life, are present, and death is not the real stepping-stone to Life and happiness. They are now and here; and a change in human consciousness, from sin to holiness, would reveal this wonder of being. Because God is ever present, no boundary of time can separate us from Him and the heaven of His presence; and because God is Life, all Life is eternal.
Is it unchristian to believe there is no death? Not unless it be a sin to believe that God is Life and All-in-all. Evil and disease do not testify of Life and God. ”

“ Being a lie, it would be truthful to call itself a lie; and by calling the knowledge of evil good, and greatly to be desired, it constitutes the lie an evil.
The reality and individuality of man are good and God-made, and they are here to be seen and demonstrated; it is only the evil belief that renders them obscure.
Matter and evil are anti-Christian, the antipodes of Science. To say that Mind is material, or that evil is Mind, is a misapprehension of being,—a mistake which will die of its own delusion; for being self-contradictory, it is also self-destructive. ”

“ My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race.
All forms of error are uprooted in Science, on the same basis whereby sickness is healed,—namely, by the establishment, through reason, revelation, and Science, of the nothingness of every claim of error, even the doctrine of heredity and other physical causes. You demonstrate the process of Science, and it proves my view conclusively, that mortal mind is the cause of all disease. ”

“ The Ego is divine consciousness, eternally radiating throughout all space in the idea of God, good, and not of His opposite, evil. The Ego is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but the full Truth is found only in divine Science, where we see God as Life, Truth, and Love. In the scientific relation of man to God, man is reflected not as human soul, but as the divine ideal, whose Soul is not in body, but is God,—the divine Principle of man. ”

“ Men must approach God reverently, doing their own work in obedience to divine law, if they would fulfil the intended harmony of being.
The principle of music knows nothing of discord. God is harmony's selfhood. His universal laws, His unchangeableness, are not infringed in ethics any more than in music. To Him there is no moral inharmony; as we shall learn, proportionately as we gain the true understanding of Deity. If God could be conscious of sin, His infinite power would straightway reduce the universe to chaos.
If God has any real knowledge of sin, sickness, and death, they must be eternal ”

“ Spirit never sins, because Spirit is God. Hence, as Spirit, Soul is sinless, and is God. Therefore there is, there can be, no spiritual death.
Transcending the evidence of the material senses, Science declares God to be the Soul of all being, the only Mind and intelligence in the universe. There is but one God, one Soul, or Mind, and that one is infinite, supplying all that is absolutely immutable and eternal,—Truth, Life, Love.
Science reveals Soul as that which the senses cannot define from any standpoint of their own. ”

“ I try to show its all-pervading presence in certain forms of theology and philosophy, where it becomes error's affirmative to Truth's negative. Anatomy and physiology make mind-matter a habitant of the cerebellum, whence it telegraphs and telephones over its own body, and goes forth into an imaginary sphere of its own creation and limitation, until it finally dies in order to better itself. But Truth never dies, and death is not the goal which Truth seeks. ”

“ Holding a material sense of Life, and lacking the spiritual sense of it, mortals die, in belief, and regard all things as temporal. A sense material apprehends nothing strictly belonging to the nature and office of Life. It conceives and beholds nothing but mortality, and has but a feeble concept of immortality.
In order to reach the true knowledge and consciousness of Life, we must learn it of good. Of evil we can never learn it, because sin shuts out the real sense of Life, and brings in an unreal sense of suffering and death. ”

“ Our highest sense of infinite good in this mortal sphere is but the sign and symbol, not the substance of good. Only faith and a feeble understanding make the earthly acme of human sense. "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." (Galatians ii. 20.)
Christian Science is both demonstration and fruition, but how attenuated are our demonstration and realization of this Science! Truth, in divine Science, is the stepping-stone to the understanding of God ”

“ Why are earth and mortals so elaborate in beauty, color, and form, if God has no part in them? By the law of opposites. The most beautiful blossom is often poisonous, and the most beautiful mansion is sometimes the home of vice. The senses, not God, Soul, form the condition of beautiful evil, and the supposed modes of self-conscious matter, which make a beautiful lie. Now a lie takes its pattern from Truth, by reversing Truth. So evil and all its forms are inverted good. God never made them; but the lie must say He made them, or it would not be evil. ”

“ The Science of physical harmony, as now presented to the people in divine light, is radical enough to promote as forcible collisions of thought as the age has strength to bear. Until the heavenly law of health, according to Christian Science, is firmly grounded, even the thinkers are not prepared to answer intelligently leading questions about God and sin, and the world is far from ready to assimilate such a grand and all-absorbing verity concerning the divine nature and character as is embraced in the theory of God's blindness to error and ignorance of sin. ”

“ Life is God, or Spirit, the supersensible eternal. The universe and man are the spiritual phenomena of this one infinite Mind. Spiritual phenomena never converge toward aught but infinite Deity. Their gradations are spiritual and divine; they cannot collapse, or lapse into their opposites, for God is their divine Principle. They live, because He lives; and they are eternally perfect, because He is perfect, and governs them in the Truth of divine Science, whereof God is the Alpha and Omega, the centre and circumference. ”

“ The harmony of man's being is not built on such false foundations, which are no more logical, philosophical, or scientific than would be the assertion that the rule of addition is the rule of subtraction, and that sums done under both rules would have one quotient.
Man's individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else he has lost his true individuality as a perfect child of God. Man's Father is not a mortal mind and a sinner ”