Mary Baker G. Eddy

“ Illusion, not law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, defaced the tablet of your mind with error, enfeebled your body.
Causation is Mind, not matter. The body but expresses mortal mind. You possess this body and you make it harmonious or discordant, according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace the body in thought, and should delineate your thoughts in health, not in sickness. You should banish the thought of disease, the belief that matter holds you in mystery and slavery. As immortal, you have a perfect, indestructible form. ”

“ CREATION.
THE eternity of Truth is changing the universe. Thought expands into expression, as mortals shake off their swaddling-clothes. “Let there be light” is the perpetual demand of Truth and Love, changing chaos into order, and turning discord into the music of the spheres.
Progress takes off human shackles. The finite must yield to the Infinite. Advancing to a higher plane of action, thought rises from the material sense to the spiritual, from the mortal to the immortal, and from the personal to the impersonal. All things are created spiritually. Mind, not matter, is the Creator. ”

“ The measurement of Life, by solar years, robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The rising sun of virtue and Truth marks the morning of being. Its manhood is the eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. When a personal and material sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with brighter glories.
Love never loses sight of beauty. Its halo rests upon its object. One marvels that a friend can ever seem less than beautiful. Man and woman, of riper years and larger lessons, are growing in beauty and immortality, in stead of lapsing into age and ugliness. ”

“ Truth should, and does, drive error out of all selfhood. It is a two-edged sword, to guard and guide. Truth places the cherub Wisdom at the gate of Understanding, to mark the proper guests. Radiant with mercy and justice, the sword of Truth gleams afar, and indicates the infinite distance between Truth and error, between the material unreal and the scientific real.
The sun, giving light and heat to the earth, is figurative of the divine Life and Love that enlighten and sustain the universe and man. ”

“ The only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human belief, until God strips off their disguise. They are not true, because He is Truth, and they are not of Him. We learn of Science that all inharmony of mortal mind or body is erroneous; and error is illusion, possessing neither reality nor identity, though seeming to be real, and identical with Truth.
If error were true, its truth would be error, and through this we should lose the standard of Truth. I find that the Science of Mind disposes of all evil. Truth, God, is not the father of error. ”

“ The wintry blasts of earth may uproot the flowers of affection, and scatter them to the winds; but this severance of fleshly ties serves to unite thought more closely to God, for Love supports the struggling heart until it ceases to sigh over the world, and begins to unfold its wings for Heaven.
Marriage is unblest or blest, according to the disappointments it involves or the hopes it fulfils. To happify existence, by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, should be the motive for society. Unity of spirit gives new pinions to joy, or else joy's drooping wings trail in dust. ”

“ The Ptolemaic blunder could not affect the harmony of being, as much as the error relating to Soul and body, — which reverses the order of Science, and assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, so that man becomes the most inharmonious body of the universe.
The senses of Spirit are without pain and forever at peace. Nothing can hide from them the beauty of all things, the might and permanence of Truth. What a transient support is mortal joy, when the power of light and lens may end with a wound on the retina! But mortals can never lose the sight or sense of what is real. ”

“ Not a blade of grass springs up, not a spray buddeth within the vale, not a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, not a flower starts from its cloistered cell, but Mind causes it. To suppose that God constitutes laws of discord, or institutes penalties without law, is a mistake.
Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven. If we concede the same reality to discord as to harmony, it has as lasting a claim upon us. If evil is as real as good, it is as immortal. If death is as real as Life, immortality is a myth. If pain is as real as the absence of pain, both must be immortal ”

“ Life is not learned from death. Spiritual being has no consciousness of death or life in matter, and in Truth we lose what we have learned from error. “The last shall be first, and the first last.” What we now esteem as matter will dissolve into its native elements of oblivion.
Divine Science puts not new wine into old bottles, Soul into matter, nor the Infinite into the finite. Our false views of matter must perish before we can grasp the facts of Spirit. The old belief must disappear, or the new idea will be spilled, and the inspiration that changes our standpoints will be gone. ”

“ Having sought his spiritual estate, he recognized the immortality and supremacy of Spirit, and the nothingness of matter. The ignorance and malice of the age would have killed the venerable philosopher, for his faith in Soul and his indifference to the body.
Who shall say that man is alive to-day, but is to-morrow dead? What has touched Life, God, to such strange issues? Here theories cease, and Science rolls back the mystery and solves the problem of man. Error bites the heel of Truth, but cannot kill it. Truth bruises the head of error, and crushes it. ”

“ This is the salvation that cometh through the Divine Principle demonstrated by Jesus.
The sculptor turns from the marble to his model, to perfect his conceptions. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiselling our thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have we not accepted the material model? and are we not reproducing it, aided in our work by vicious sculptors of hideous forms? Do we not hear, from all mankind, of the imperfect model? Is the world not holding it before our gaze continually? ”

“ Called to the bed of death, what material remedy have we, when all such remedies have already failed? Mind is our last resort; but it should not be deemed the least, as we shall learn in that startling moment. The dream of death is to be mastered by Mind. Thought must waken from its own material declaration, “I am dead,” to catch this trumpet-word of Truth, “There is no death!”
All is Mind; there is no matter. Life is real, and death is the delusion. A demonstration of the facts of Soul, according to Jesus, resolves the dark visions of sense into harmony and immortality. ”

“ A bad woman is a human leper, dangerous to all who approach her.
In marriage, avoid disparities in age, taste, culture, and morals. Always choose those qualities which wear well.
Jealousy is the grave of affection. The presence of mistrust, where confidence is due, touches with its mildew the flowers of Eden, and scatters love's petals to decay.
The bridal altar is the verge of a new existence, wherein the old is fading out, and the new coming in. Two mortals are to unite in one hope, one freedom, one joy, walking the long path together. ”

“ If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear. As vapor which melts before the sun, evil would vanish before the reality of Good. One must hide the other. How important, then, to choose Good as the reality! Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else. God's Being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Like the archpriests of yore, man is free “to enter into the holiest,” — the realm of God.
Material sense never helps mortals to understand Spirit, God. ”

“ Music is the rhythm of head and heart. Mortal mind is the harp of many strings, discoursing either harmony or discord, as the hand which sweeps over it is human or divine.
Before human knowledge dipped to its depths into a false sense of things, — into belief in material origins which discards the one Mind and true source of Being, — it is possible that the impressions of Truth were as distinct as sound, and that they came thus to the primitive prophets. If the medium of hearing is wholly spiritual, it is normal and indestructible. ”

“ Physiology is one of the apples from the tree of knowledge. Error said that to eat thereof would open man's eyes, and make him as a god. Instead of this enlargement, it closes the eyes to man's God-given dominion over the earth.
Truth casts out all evils, and every materialistic method, with the higher spiritual law, — the law that gives sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the dumb, feet to the lame. If Christian Science dishonors belief, it honors understanding; and there is but One Mind entitled to honor. ”

“ If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of good, and doubts it, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil, and doubt them, — no longer thinking it natural to sin, and unnatural to forsake it, no longer imagining evil to be the real, and good the unreal? Truth should not seem as surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem as real as Truth. There is no error in Science, and our lives must be governed by Science in order to be in harmony with God, the Principle of all being. ”

“ Whatever seems to be a new creation, or being, is but a new discovery of something old, — new multiplication, or a self-division of mortal thought, — as when some finite sense peers out from its cloisters with amazement, and attempts to pattern the Infinite.
Multiplication of a human and mortal sense of persons or things is not creation. Personal and material man, like an atom of dust thrown into the face of spiritual immensity, is a flickering sense, instead of an abiding consciousness of being.
Mortals must look beyond fading, finite forms, if they would gain the true sense of things. ”