Mary Baker G. Eddy

“ Mortal mind is a harp of many strings that discourses harmony or discord accordingly as the hand that sweeps over its strings is human or divine. Whatsoever inspires with Wisdom, Truth, or Love, be it song, sermon, or science, blesses the human family; they are the crumbs that fall from the Master's table, feeding the hungry and giving to the thirsty living waters. Spiritual draughts are healing, but material lotions and laws prevent Truth healing the sick, even as religious rites and creeds prevent the Spirit, that is Truth. If we trust one we distrust the other. ”

“ CREATION.
The evermore of Truth is changing the universe. Thought expands beyond expression. We are losing our swaddling clothes, asking for more light. Let there be light is the demand of Life and Truth, changing chaos to order, and discord to the music of the spheres. Progress is taking off shackles, and the finite yielding to the infinite. Advancing to a higher plane of action, thought rises from the material to the spiritual, from the mortal to the immortal, and from the personal to the impersonal idea of God. ”

“ Love paints the petal with myriad hues of beauty, glances in the sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of Omnipotence, kindles the night with heaven's gems, and covers the earth with bright and living characters. The world would collapse without the intelligence that holds the winds in His fists. Philosophy nor scepticism can efface the science that reveals Mind through its wondrous works. The immortal sense of beauty must enhance it, and nearness, not distance, lend enchantment to the view. ”

“ And which is most likely to reign when mind governs in both cases? and which has the advantage, Truth or error, to govern the result through mind and bring out harmony?
Called to the bed of death, what remedy have we in matter when all its remedies have failed? Mind must be our only resort at last, and should not be deemed the least of all power, as we shall learn from this startled moment. To break the dream of death, thought must waken from its slumber of belief and catch this trumpet-tone of Truth. There is no death, all is mind, there is no matter, — “he is not dead but sleepeth.” ”

“ The embellishments of the person are poor substitutes for the beauty of Spirit, shining resplendent and eternal over age and decay. Measuring Life by solar years robs youth and gives uncomeliness to age. The rising sun of virtue and Truth is the morning of being; and its manhood, the eternal noon, undimmed by a setting sun. When a personal and material sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit dawns upon the enraptured sense with brighter glories. Love never loses sight of the halo of beauty that rests upon its object, and marvels that our friend can seem to others aught but beautiful. ”

“ The sick are healed by it, the sorrowing comforted, and the sinner reformed. But these are the results of Principle not person, of science and not mediumship. Soul sends despatches everywhere, but the electric wire can only carry to Europe a submarine whisper, foreshadowing metaphysical science. Little by little thought must give up its materiality, and become spiritual; even mortal mind is expanding beyond its fetters, and science is pushing onward the centuries.
Spirit is never in limits or limbo, and before we commune with Spirit the belief of death must be destroyed. ”

“ Divine science enables man to grasp the standard of liberty, and escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death. Jesus has marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept its glorious import and be free! This is your divine right. Sin brought death. A belief, and not a law, has bound you, fettered your free limbs, and crippled you, marred the tablet of mortal mind with error, enfeebled your body through your belief. All causation is Mind, not matter; and when the belief that causes your sin or your sickness is destroyed, the sin and the sickness are gone. ”

“ The immortal basis of all being is Soul not body, Life and not death; and from this basis science reveals the glorious possibilities of man unlimited by a belief. We cannot learn Life through death; for in Spirit we lose all that we learn of matter even as in Truth we lose what we learn of error. “The last shall be first and the first last.” What we esteem as matter now will sometime dissolve. Divine science puts not new wine into old bottles, Soul into body, the infinite into a finite. Our beliefs of matter must yield before we can grasp the facts of Spirit. ”

“ How long before we arrive at the demonstration of scientific being no man knoweth, not the Son but the Father; yet one thing is certain, that sin, sickness, and death will continue in belief until we do reach that high goal. The footsteps of thought, as they pass from material stand-points, are slow; they portend a long night to the traveller, but the guardians of that night, the angels of His presence, are spiritual intuitions that tell us when it is far spent and the dawn approacheth. Whoso opens the way in science is a pilgrim and stranger that marks out the pathway of future generations. ”

“ The footsteps of metaphysical science are not seen as much as felt. The “still, small voice” of Truth is uttering itself, but we are daily turning away from those utterances, else we are yielding to them and going up higher in our experiences and demonstration. To become as a little child, who is willing to leave the old for the new, makes thought receptive of the advanced idea, willing to let the old landmark disappear. The theory, doctrine or belief, pleasure, or pain of sense go into oblivion, and have a resurrection of what is clothed in shining garments. ”

“ Your body is but an expression of mortal mind; you possess the body, and make it harmonious or discordant according to the images of thought reflected upon it; you embrace the body in thought, and should delineate that thought in health and not in sickness. You should think of your body as perfect, and banish the thoughts of disease, or that matter holds it in mystery and slavery. You, the immortal, have a perfect and divine form; it is only you, the mortal and suppositional, that make your body discordant, according to the ignorance, fear, and belief that govern it. ”

“ We lose sight of the perfect Father and divine Principle that governs man in Christian science through doctrines such as those, and catch glimpses of God only as those clouds of error melt into such thinness that we perceive the image of Him in some word or deed that reveals man's true being, and the supremacy and reality of good, and the nothingness and unreality of evil. Mortal man is totally depraved, a lie from the beginning; for man is immortal, and God, Truth, is not the author of a lie, and the Truth pierces the suppositional error, or mortal man, as a sunbeam the cloud. ”

“ Beauty, wealth, or fame is incompetent to meet the demands of the affections, and should never waver the balance against the more honest claims of intellect, goodness, and virtue. Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love; it is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires an object to cherish. Our affections are not poured forth vainly when meeting no return; they enrich the being, enlarging, purifying, and elevating it. The wintry blasts of earth may transplant the flowers of affection, or scatter them to the winds ”

“ Detaching the senses from the body, or matter, that are only attached to it through a belief, you learn the meaning of Soul, the immutable and immortal. Springing away from the mutations of time and sense, you have not lost the objects of Life, or your own identity; and if you will turn your gaze thither, you will grow as the bird that bursts the ovum and finds his wings. Beauty and blessedness of Spirit are your proofs of existence, and that whereby you should recognize yourself. ”

“ That Mind is in matter, or that matter is the medium of Mind, is no more natural or real, than for a rock to embrace a tree in embryo and become the medium of its development
and identification. The only excuse for entertaining such opinions is our ignorance of Spirit, that can yield only to the understanding of divine science, whereby we enter into the kingdom of Truth, and learn that Spirit is supreme, and matter but an error of belief, and they no more commingle than light and darkness; when one appears the other disappears. Harmony is real and immortal: discord is unreal and mortal. ”

“ The truly scientific are a law to themselves. They do violence to no man, neither accuse falsely. Sin will make deadly thrusts at the scientist, as penal codes give place to higher law. But science will ameliorate the malice of mortal mind, unlike the history of religious persecutions, and turn back violence.
What we need is Christ and him crucified, Truth and trials, self-denials and victories, until we put all error under our feet. Too many religions, and not enough Christianity, is the history of all ages. To steal in private, and give in public, is political, not Christian, economy. ”

“ To know that brains cannot kill a man, or affect the functions of the mind, would prevent their being diseased, except for a moral offence which in itself is the worst belief of disease. The metaphysician should never entertain a doubt of his patient's recovery. Life is the reality to him, and death the unreal; health and harmony are the facts of being, sickness and discord the fables. He should never hold in mind the images of disease, or think of it, only when he is disputing its reality and effacing all its forms and types to himself and his patients. ”

“ Love sends forth Her unselfish and enduring ideas, from the tiny grass growing beneath the foot of man, spreading for him soft carpets, and supplying food for fowl and beast, from the modest violet that lifts her blue eye to heaven and saith, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” the sheltering stone that tells of “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” up to the kindling sun, shining on all, glinting on the church-dome, glancing into the prison-cell, gliding into the sick-room, gilding the cot, brightening the flowers, beautifying the landscape, blessing the world. ”

“ Because metaphysics is at war with physics, even as Truth makes war upon error, the old schools will battle science another century. When there were not so many doctors, and less thought given to sanitary subjects, there were better constitutions and less disease. In olden times, who that ever heard of dyspepsia, spino-meningitis, hay-fever, and rose-fever? What an abuse of nature to say that the smile of God, a rose, can produce suffering! The joy of its presence, its beauty and modesty, should uplift the thought and destroy a fever. ”

“ In marriage, avoid disparity in ages, tastes, or education, and make choice only of those qualities that wear well. Jealousy is the grave of affection; mistrust, where confidence is due, touches with mildew the flowers of Eden, and scatters to the four winds the leaves of love. A bridal altar is the verge of a new existence, wherein the old is fading out of the experience, to admit the new; two mortals mingling into one. Be not in haste to take the vow, “until death do us part,” but consider well its obligations, responsisibilities, and relations to all your future happiness. ”

“ Custom, education, and fashion form the transient standard of mortal beauty; but immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a beauty of its own that belongs to Spirit. Immortal man and woman are the models of a more refined sense, the pictures of a Mind that is perfect, and their bodies reflect those higher conceptions of loveliness that exceed all material sense of symmetry. To become less sense and more Soul is the recipe for beauty, and to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body to the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of impersonal bliss. ”

“ The man of riper years and larger lessons is growing into beauty and immortality, instead of age and ugliness. Mind is feeding his body with supernal freshness and fairness, supplying it with beautiful images of thought, and destroying the errors of sense that say each day points to a nearer tomb. Man is not a pendulum betwixt evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death. Life and its faculties are unmeasured by calenders, and the perfect and immortal man is the eternal model of his Maker. ”

“ Physiology takes the power into its own hands, and out of God's, and is like fiction, in which debauchery is toned down to fascinate, and mankind are in danger of catching its method. The very opposite teachings of physiology are all that will ever re-open the gates of paradise that beliefs have closed, and reach being in science, where man is upright, pure, and free, having no need to consult calendars or clouds to learn the probabilities of the life of an immortal man, or to study brainology to know how much of a man he is. Mistaking his origin and nature, we call man both matter and Spirit ”

“ Man is by no means a material germ, starting from the imperfect to reach above its origin to God; for the stream rises no higher than its fount. Man is neither young nor old, he has neither birth nor death; he is not an animal, vegetable, or migrating mind, passing from the immortal to the mortal, from good to evil and from evil up to good; such admissions leap headlong into darkness and dogma. Shakespeare's description of infancy and age is a startling picture of helplessness and non-intelligence instead of Mind. ”

“ In the nineteenth century I affix for all time the word Science to Christianity, and error to personal sense, and call the world to battle on this issue. I know the discovery of this science has arrayed error against me, notwithstanding its Truth heals the sick, for it dishonors the schools; but I also know it honors God, and I shall perform my mission on earth without fear or dissimulation; for to be well done, it must be done unselfishly. Not until it is understood that Christianity is science, will Christianity be based on principle or God, and found unerring. ”

“ Truth and Love create only what is fit to be eternal. And when did Truth ever destroy its own idea? God cannot destroy man, because he is the reflection of God. But mortals reflect not immortality, and a sick man or a sinner is not the image and likeness of God. Does wisdom find pleasure in drunkenness? But personal sense, mortal mind, and belief say there is pleasure in it; and you cannot make the inebriate leave his besottedness until his belief yields to a higher thought, and then he turns from his cup as the dreamer that wakes from his incubus. ”