Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/266

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
254
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

We welcome the increase of knowledge, even though it lead to evil, because sinful human invention must have its day, and we want that day over.

Paul learned that in order to be “present with the Lord,” or Truth, we must be “absent from the body,” — that is, from material evidence.

Cain concluded, very naturally, that if Life was in the body, and man gave it, man had the right to take it away. This incident shows that the belief of Life in matter was a murderer from the beginning.

Midnight foretells the dawn. Led by a solitary star, amid the darkness, the magii of old foretold the Messiahship of Truth. What sage to-day, beholding this light, is believed when he describes its effulgence?

Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours. Entering upon the heretofore unknown eternity of Spirit, material sense, like an outlaw escaping to a foreign land, is doomed to an unlooked-for death.

Humanity advances out of belief into Science, but it advances slowly, because unwillingness to learn clogs the mind and loads Christendom with chains. So much hypocrisy swells the catalogue of social ills, that the demands and demonstration of Truth are held undesirable, and they even incur the enmity of mankind.

What the prophets of Judah did, the worshippers of Baal failed to do; yet artifice and delusion claimed that they could equal the work of Wisdom. So mediumship and clairvoyance claim to work the same cures as Christian Science.

Mind evolves images of thought. These may appear to the ignorant to be apparitions; but they are mysterious