William W. Walter

“ Jones with a contemptuous toss of his head.
"Did you ever read what they call their textbook, 'Science and Health?'"
"No, my time is too valuable to waste it on reading nonsense."
"How do you know it is nonsense?"
"I have heard enough of what it contains."
"Can you quote something, Mr. Jones?"
"Yes, here are some of the things printed in that book:
"There is no death. You haven't a body. Your stomach can't ache. There is no matter. Brains can't think. There is no sickness. There is no sin. There is no evil. All is good, Good is God, God is Mind, Mind is God, God is all." ”

“ Now that I think of it, I don't believe the Bible mentions anywhere that God made evil. It speaks of the Lord God cursing the ground, but it does not accuse Him of making evil; and yet God should have made all. Can evil only be a lie, a dream, a delusion, a mistake or misapprehension, as Walter called it? What a state for a minister to be in; why, I believe I am questioning the truth of the Bible. ”

“ Simply thinking you are sick or well and believing it does not make you sick, or well, in reality; it only seems to do it to our mistaken mortal sense of things; the truth of anything remains the truth, regardless of how many falsehoods are told about it."
"Am I to understand Walter, that no matter what I or others may think or believe about this body, it does not change the facts regarding it, but only seems to do so to our senses?" ”

“ Jesus Christ said: The last enemy to overcome is death.' This surely does not mean that we must submit to death, but the opposite, or overcome death. Christ's bidding us to overcome death shows that death is an evil. Then all things that are allies of death, such as sickness, poverty, accidents and the like, must be overcome, and when we have overcome all these things there will be no death to overcome; therefore I bid you awake from this delusion, this dream of life in matter, to the truth of life in Mind, in God. Simply believing in God is not enough, you must know God. ”

“ Lillian, I will admit that never in my whole life have I been so confused on anything as I am in regard to these two narratives of creation. If we admit that the first is the real and was all that was made, whence came all this evil, sin, and sickness into the world, and how did I acquire this material body, and where did all these other material things come from? If we admit that the second creation is of God, then God, in a sense, would be responsible for all the trials and tribulations of man, for God is all-powerful and could have made us better, even to perfection. ”

“ For a few moments after I awake, I still feel the pain and lie there trembling with fright, for the dream has been so real. Yet in reality I never left the couch, and everything in the room is there just as I left it when I went to sleep. It was all an illusion, and the only thing necessary to prove it to me was something or somebody to awaken me. So it is with man. God made him perfect and everything good, and all man needs to prove it to himself is to be awakened, that is, made acquainted with the true facts pertaining to life. This means man must understand the science of being ”

“ If the one who discovered this truth should try to convince the professor of Christianity, the minister, that God made only the good and the evil did not exist, the professor would say, thou blasphemest, God made everything—if he should advance the thought that man was wholly spiritual, the professor would ridicule him, and say you must be mistaken, my body is material. I can feel it, and every man's body has been so since the beginning of the world. ”

“ There is no good in it, hence not of God's making, but is the work of evil, or devil, in other words, the work of a delusion, the believing of a lie. And when we stand meekly by and see evil destroy our health, our hopes, our happiness, our homes, without a protest, we are abetting the devil in his work. The Bible says God gave man dominion over all the earth, so rise in the might of your intelligence, your Mind, and destroy this evil, this illusion, this lie, with the sword of truth, in Christ's name. ”

“ God made us in His image and likeness, and as He is Spirit we must be like Him or spiritual, for matter is not the likeness of Spirit, but its opposite."
"That seems quite reasonable, Walter," said his mother, "but this material body is here, I can see it and feel it."
"It only seems to be material, mother, because we take our information from our five material senses; and as these five senses can only testify regarding material things because of their materiality, they do not testify to the truth, or reality, of man and the universe." ”

“ If we see any of our brethren sick, we claim it to be the will of God. If we see the father of a family taken away, we bow our heads and say God's will be done. If we see a family of children left motherless, again we bow our heads and say God's will be done. If we see a beautiful infant snatched by death from the breast of it's heart-broken mother, we meekly bow again, and, with heart full of sorrow, say, it's the will of God. ”

“ Most assuredly not, have I not told you that God heals the sick, that God is Good, that God is Mind? If I have robbed you of your false god, I have done a good work, for then you are ready to seek the true God. ”

“ And when we remember that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat of all the trees excepting this tree of knowledge of good and evil, it seems to me that they were forbidden to believe that both good and evil were real, in other words, to believe that both spirit and matter existed; for as soon as they would eat or believed in materiality the penalty would be death, as they were believing in something that did not in reality exist. ”

“ I had long ago come to the conclusion that it was the will of God that he was sick, but through his own realization of the great truth that God made only the good, he was healed—in a like manner his mother, my wife, was healed of the same dread disease by one who knew that the good only was real, and proved it by destroying this seeming evil, which to us is known as tuberculosis. ”

“ At times we would deceive ourselves and believe we were right, only to find later on that we were in deeper trouble. And when we had children of our own, we would still teach them the same as we were taught that two times two are five, and the longer the world stood, the greater would become this mistake, as no one knew the truth that two times two were only four; yet all this time the principle of mathematics existed and was correct, but man knew it not. ”

“ The simple reason why all these things did not succeed in driving out this evil, or devil, is that in reality there wasn't any devil to drive out, as it was only an imaginary thing and had no existence, only as an illusion in the mind of the woman. About 2,000 years ago, there lived a man who was intelligent enough to understand what the trouble was. He said that there were not any evils, or devils, and that God, or the Creative Principle, was good only, and that evil was a lie, or delusion, and proved His words by His works. ”

“ Then like a flash he remembered one of the sayings of the practitioner when he had told her that he thought he would have trouble in persuading his father to try Christian Science. She said, "Truth has found you and Truth will lead you out of your trouble." He now bowed his head and said, "Oh, God, I had forgotten that thou art an ever-present help in time of trouble."
He then secured his "Science and Health" and after reading for some time he stopped and said: "Here is what I have been looking for." Then he slowly read, aloud, "God, Good, is not the creator of evil." ”

“ Walter now had the privilege he wanted, but he felt he must be careful not to say too much for fear of awakening his father's suspicion; so he quietly opened the Bible he had brought with him, and read aloud, Genesis 2, 7th verse, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." As he finished reading this verse, he looked at his father and said, "You will notice, father, that the Bible says, 'the Lord God' formed this dust man, and this is not the same God that created man in his image and likeness. ”

“ For instead of loving God, we fear Him, and lay every evil that befalls us at His door. If there be a cyclone, a flood, a cloudburst, a railroad disaster, a conflagration, an earthquake, an epidemic, we say it is the will of God. Oftentimes we labor long and faithfully to accomplish a desired result, and just as we think we have success in our hands, we fail, and all our hopes and desires are destroyed ”

“ This thought made the good man's heart stand still. No, no, it could not be; it must be some slight error in the translation or something of that kind—yes, it must be; how was it that he had never seen it before? Then he became conscious that his wife was asking him some question.
"James," he heard her say, "are there really two creations, one spiritual and the other material?"
What should he answer? He never was so at a loss for a reply in his whole life; there was his son and his wife, both apparently depending on him for an explanation, and he absolutely incapable of making a rational one. ”

“ And this Lord God spoken of that formed the dust man is not the real creator, the true God, but is man himself, who, through his own false idea or belief, formed man of dust, in other words, by his misapprehension of his true nature, man thinks himself material, when, in reality, he is spiritual, and it is through this mistake that all this evil or materiality seems to exist. But it is no more real than the dust man, and gets its seeming reality in the same way through a delusion or misapprehension of the truth. ”

“ If we reason from the standpoint that Mind is the creative force or first cause, and as we know that like produces like, it would be impossible for the creative force, or Mind, to produce matter, for matter is the opposite of mind. Now let us see what Mind does create,—why thoughts or ideas and nothing else, so we see that man is a thought, or a number of them, or idea emanating from the one Mind or creative force and the idea or thought must be the image and likeness of the mind or intelligence that conceived it. ”

“ Only this, father, that this is just what we have been long doing regarding our bodies, thinking that they were material and believing it, but our mistaken thought regarding our bodies has not in reality changed them, any more than the thought that the earth was flat changed the earth. ”

“ James, if sin, sickness, and death are real, God must have made them, for the Bible says God made everything that was made and pronounced it all very good. It might be possible to stretch the imagination so as to say that sickness, or even death, might be good under certain conditions; but no Christian would agree with you that sin was good. And if we would agree that sickness and death were made by God and were good, then Jesus Christ destroyed the works of God, and at the same time destroyed something that was good. ”

“ On the same line of reasoning, we would have to admit God created all the evils of this world, for we see these evils every day, and then I would have to admit that God made me sick, and I can never believe that, for Genesis 1, 31st verse reads, 'And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.' If we believe this, we cannot possibly believe He made any evil thing. ”

“ Now let us suppose that some one should discover that man was spiritual and had a spiritual body, that the entire universe was spiritual and matter did not exist only as a false belief; that God made everything good, consequently there could be no evil, and that evil existed only in belief. ”

“ As soon as Walter had left the room, the pastor turned to his wife and said, "I wonder what can have taken possession of that boy, he has changed wonderfully. Whereas he was always speaking of his sickness, and complaining of being weak, he now never refers to his trouble, nor does he complain of being tired any more. And what is more wonderful, he does not walk and act as if he was tired or weak; he also looks cheerful and his explanation was full of vim and courage, even though it was nonsense." ”

“ The Bible says: 'God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.' Let us define this word omniscient. In a common sense way, 'omni' means all, and 'scientia' means science, then it would be proper to say, 'God is all science, and science is perfect intelligence,' for the scientific reality concerning anything, is the perfect intelligence pertaining thereto. We can now say, 'God is all intelligence,' the word 'all' includes our intelligence, then God is the intelligence, the thinking ability, or mind, of man. ”

“ To me it seems plain, the carnal mind is the fleshly mind, which thinks everything is material; and this method of thinking leads to the belief in a material body and eventually in the death, or unreality, of this material body, the returning of the fleshly body to its original state, dust to dust, the real meaning of which I think is, nothing you were, to nothing you must return, for only the real is eternal. ”

“ Reasoning from this standpoint, he could agree that life and intelligence were the same, and that the intelligence of man was his mind was also plain, but that Mind was God, was beyond his comprehension, because he had always conceived of mind and brain as being the same, consequently, that the brain had the power of thought. Yet Walter's explanation concerning the inability of the brain, in the corpse, to think, and that it was as material as the rest of the body was quite convincing that brain, in itself, did not contain the power of thought. ”

“ The pastor's back stiffened up perceptibly, as he said rather cooly, "Mrs. White, don't you think your accusations are a little unjust? You must remember I am an ordained minister."
"Mr. Williams, don't think I am alluding only to you; almost the whole human race has made the same mistake. I am free to confess that I did not know how to pray aright until after I had studied 'Science and Health.' If you will allow me, I will try to prove my assertions." ”

“ This must be what the author of 'Science and Health' called 'error,' and when the truth is declared pertaining to any error, that error ceases to exist-for an error can only exist as long as we believe the error to be the truth. When we discover the truth respecting a lie, the lie is gone, for truth has taken its place; the truth is there all the time, but we cannot see the truth because we believe the lie. ”