Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/82

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
70
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

which guards itself from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

In fine, I call that mind free which, conscious of its affinity with God, and confiding in his promises by Jesus Christ, devotes itself faithfully to the unfolding of all its powers, which passes the bounds of time and. death, which hopes to advance forever, and which finds inexhaustible power . . . in the prospect of immortality.

How grand his conclusion, “Such is the spiritual freedom Christ came to give.”

The voice of God in behalf of the African slave still echoed in our land, when a new abolitionist swelled the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a son of God, — that the fetters, of matter be stricken from the human mind, and its freedom won, not with bayonet and blood, not through human warfare, but through Divine Science.

In 1866, higher than the platform of human rights, I built the next staging; and built it for diviner claims, made not through code or creed, but in demonstration of “peace on earth and good-will to man.” The yoke of human codes cramps the human faculties which need freedom. I would rend asunder the cankering fetters, and give man his birthright of allegiance to his Maker.

The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, I would save from the slavery of their own beliefs, and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs who hold the children of Israel in bondage.

I saw before me the Red Sea and the wilderness, but I pressed on, through faith in Truth, trusting this strong deliverer to guide into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall, and the rights of the Spirit-man's