Mary Baker G. Eddy

“ This Science of God and man is the Holy Ghost, which reveals and sustains the unbroken and eternal harmony of God, man, and the universe. It is the Kingdom of Heaven, the ever-present reign of harmony, already with us. ”

“ To material sense, Jesus first appeared as a helpless human babe; but to immortal and spiritual vision he was one with the Father, even the eternal idea of God, that was — and is — neither young nor old, neither dead nor risen. The mutations of mortal sense are the evening and the morning of human thought, — the twilight and dawn of earthly vision, which precedeth the nightless radiance of Divine Life. Human perception, advancing toward the apprehension of the unchangeable God, halts, retreats, and again goes forward ”

“ 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 can not 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. ”

“ As the image of God, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not death. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else we have lost our true individuality, as a perfect child of God. Our Father is not a mortal mind and a sinner; or else the immortal and unerring Mind, God, is not our Father ”

“ You can not 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. Standing in no basic Truth, we make “the worse appear the better reason,” and the unreal masquerades as the real, in our thought.
Evil is without Principle. Being destitute of Principle, it is devoid of Science. ”

“ My mind is more than matter. In my mortal mind, matter becomes conscious, and is able to see, taste, hear, feel, smell. Whatever matter thus affirms is mainly correct. If you, oh Good, deny this, then I deny your truthfulness. If you say that matter is unconscious, you stultify my intellect, insult my conscience, and dispute self-evident facts; for nothing can be clearer than the testimony of the five senses.
Good. Spirit is the only Substance. Spirit is God, and God is Good; hence Good is the only Substance, the only Mind. ”

“ As Spirit, Soul is immortal, because Spirit is God. Hence as Spirit, Soul never sins. Spirit is Life. Hence 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 can not define from any standpoint of their own. ”

“ Is There no Death?
JESUS not only said “I am the Way and the Truth,” but also, “I am the Life.” God is Life; and as there is but one God, there can be but one Life. Must man die, then, in order to inherit Eternal Life and enter Heaven? ”

“ All forms of error are uprooted in Science, on the same principle 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. I demonstrate the process of Science; for it proves my view conclusively, that mortal mind is the cause of all disease. Destroy the mental sense of the disease, and the disease itself disappears. Destroy the sense of sin, and sin itself disappears. ”

“ Mind is not, can not be, in matter. It sees, hears, feels, tastes, smells as mind, and not as matter. Matter can not talk; and hence, whatever it appears to say of itself is a lie. This lie, that Mind can be in matter, — claiming to be something beside God, denying Truth and its demonstration in Christian Science, — this lie I declare an illusion. This denial enlarges the human intellect, by removing its evidence from sense to Soul, and from finiteness into Infinity. It honors conscious human individuality, by showing God as its source. ”

“ Jesus has made the way plain, — so plain that all are without excuse who walk not in it; but this way is not the path of physical science, human philosophy, or mystic psychology.
The talent and genius of the centuries have wrongly reckoned. They have not based upon revelation their arguments and conclusions as to the source and resources of Being, — its combinations, phenomena, and outcome, — but have built instead upon the sand of human reason. They have not accepted the simple teaching and life of Jesus, as the only true solution of the perplexing problem of human existence. ”

“ He is best understood as Supreme Being, as infinite and conscious Life, as the affectionate Father and Mother of all He creates; but this Divine Parent no more enters into His creation, than the human father enters into his child. His creation is not the Ego, but the reflection of the Ego. The Ego is God himself, the infinite Soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Truth of Life in Divine Science — undisturbed by human error, sin, and death — saith forever, “I am the living God, and man is My idea, never in matter, nor resurrected from it. Why seek ye the living among the dead? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But Truth never dies, and death is not the goal which Truth seeks.
The evil ego has but the visionary substance of matter. It lacks the Substance of Spirit, — Mind, Life, Soul, Mortal mind is self-creative and self-sustained, until it becomes non-existent. It has no origin or existence in Spirit, Immortal Mind, or Good. Matter is not truly conscious; and mortal error, called mind, is not godlike. ”

“ The sweet and sacred sense of the permanence of man's unity with his Maker can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of Good, opening wide the portal from death into Life; and when this Life shall appear “we shall be like Him,” and we shall go to the Father, not through death, but through Life, not through error, but through Truth.
All Life is Spirit, and Spirit can never dwell in its antagonist, matter. Life, therefore, is not death, because God can not be the opposite of Himself. In Christian Science there is no matter; hence matter neither lives nor dies. ”

“ The Way, in the flesh, is the suffering which leads out of the flesh. The Way, in Spirit, is the Way of Life, Truth, and Love, redeeming us from the false sense of the flesh, and the wounds it bears. This threefold Messiah reveals the self-destroying ways of error, and the Life-giving Way of Truth. ”

“ Applying these distinctions to Evil and God, we shall find that Evil is egotistic, — boastful, but fleeing like a shadow at daybreak; while God is egoistic, knowing only His own all-presence, all-knowledge, all-power. ”

“ 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 in God, — the Divine Principle of man. ”

“ Bruise the head of this Serpent, as Truth and “the woman” are doing in Christian Science, and it stings your heel, rears its crest proudly, and goes on saying: “Am I not myself? Am I not mind and matter, person and thing?” ”

“ It can be shown, in detail, that evil does not obtain in Spirit, God; and that God, or Good, is Spirit alone ; whereas, evil does, according to belief, obtain in matter; and that evil is a false, claim, — false to God, false to Truth and Life. Hence the claim of matter usurps the prerogative of God, saying: “I am a creator. God made me, and I make man and the material universe.”
Spirit is the only Creator, and man and the universe are His spiritual concepts. By matter is commonly meant mind, — not the highest Mind, but a false form of mind. ”

“ 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; but this does not destroy the so-called fact of the claim. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every claim of sin.
As with sickness, so is it with sin. To admit that sin has any claim whatever, just or unjust, is to admit a dangerous fact. ”

“ 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 the 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. ”

“ Error says: “God must know death, in order to strike at its root;” but God saith: “I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. ”

“ 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 can not 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.
To attempt the calculation of His mighty ways, from the evidence before the material senses, is fatuous. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. To gain a temporary consciousness of God's law is to feel, in a certain finite human sense, that God comes to us and pities us; but the attainment of the understanding of His presence, through the Science of God, destroys our sense of imperfection, or of His absence, through a diviner sense that God is all true consciousness; and this convinces us that, as we get still nearer Him, we must forever lose our own consciousness of error. ”

“ A sense of death is not requisite to a proper or true sense of Life, but beclouds it. Death can never alarm or even appear to him who fully understands Life. The death-penalty comes through our ignorance of Life, — of that which is without beginning and without end, — and is the punishment of this ignorance.
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. ”

“ In the days of Eden, humanity was misled by a false personality, — a talking snake, — according to Biblical history. This pretender taught the opposite of Truth. This abortive ego, this fable of error, is laid bare in Christian Science.
Human theories call, or miscall, this evil a Child of God. Philosophy would multiply and subdivide personality into everything that exists, whether expressive or not expressive of the Mind which is God. Human wisdom says of evil, “The Lord knows it!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Death has no quality of Life; and no divine fiat commands us to believe in aught which is unlike God, or to deny that He is Life Eternal.
Life as God, moral and spiritual Good, is not seen in the mineral, vegetable, or animal kingdoms. Hence the inevitable conclusion, that Life is not in these kingdoms, and that the popular views to this effect are not up to the Christian standard of Life, or equal to the reality of Being, whose Principle is God.
When “the Word is made flesh” among mortals, the Truth of Life is rendered practical on the body. Eternal Life is partially understood ”