Part 5 (1/2)

Jesus said, ”I and my Father are one.” He taught no selfhood as existent in matter. In his ident.i.ty there is no evil. Individuality and Life were real to him only as spiritual and good, not as material or evil. This incensed the rabbins against Jesus, because it was an indignity to their personality; and this personality they regarded as both good and evil, as is still claimed by the worldly-wise. To them evil was even more the ego than was the good. Sin, sickness, and death were evil's concomitants. This evil ego they believed must extend throughout the universe, as being equally identical and self-conscious with G.o.d. This ego was in the earthquake, thunderbolt, and tempest.

The Pharisees fought Jesus on this issue. It furnished the battle-ground of the past, as it does of the present. The fight was an effort to enthrone evil. Jesus a.s.sumed the burden of disproof by destroying sin, sickness, and death, to sight and sense.

Nowhere in Scripture is evil connected with good, the being of G.o.d, and with every pa.s.sing hour it is losing its false claim to existence or consciousness. All that can exist is G.o.d and His idea.

Credo

It is fair to ask of every one a reason for the faith within. Though it be but to repeat my twice-told tale,--nay, the tale already told a hundred times,--yet ask, and I will answer.

_Do you believe in G.o.d?_

I believe more in Him than do most Christians, for I have no faith in any other thing or being. He sustains my individuality. Nay, more--He _is_ my individuality and my Life. Because He lives, I live. He heals all my ills, destroys my iniquities, deprives death of its sting, and robs the grave of its victory.

To me G.o.d is All. 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 G.o.d Himself, the infinite Soul.

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 G.o.d, and that man is coexistent with G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 dest.i.tute of Principle, it is devoid of Science. Hence it is undemonstrable, without proof. This gives me a clearer right to call evil a negation, than to affirm it to be something which G.o.d sees and knows, but which He straightway commands mortals to shun or relinquish, lest it destroy them. This notion of the destructibility of Mind implies the possibility of its defilement; but how can infinite Mind be defiled?

_Do you believe in matter_?

I believe in matter only as I believe in evil, that it is something to be denied and destroyed to human consciousness, and is unknown to the Divine.

We should watch and pray that we enter not into the temptation of pantheistic belief in matter as sensible mind. We should subjugate it as Jesus did, by a dominant understanding of Spirit.

At best, matter is only a phenomenon of mortal mind, of which evil is the highest degree; but really there is no such thing as _mortal mind_,--though we are compelled to use the phrase in the endeavor to express the underlying thought.

In reality there are no material states or stages of consciousness, and matter has neither Mind nor sensation. Like evil, it is dest.i.tute of Mind, for Mind is G.o.d.

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.

Reasoning from false premises,--that Life is material, that immortal Soul is sinful, and hence that sin is eternal,--the reality of being is neither seen, felt, heard, nor understood. Human philosophy and human reason can never make one hair white or black, except in belief; whereas the demonstration of G.o.d, as in Christian Science, is gained through Christ as perfect manhood.