Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/163

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
FOOTSTEPS OF TRUTH.
143

Acute and chronic beliefs reproduce their own types. The acute belief of physical life comes on at a remote period, and is not as disastrous as the chronic belief.

I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A lady of eighty-five, whom I knew, had The eyes and teeth. a return of sight. Another lady, at ninety, had new teeth, incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. One gentleman, at sixty, had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth, without a decaying cavity.

Beauty, as well as Truth, is eternal; but the beauty of material things passes away, fading and fleeting as Eternal beauty. mortal belief. Custom, education, and fashion form the transient standard of mortal beauty. Immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a beauty of its own, — the beauty of Spirit. Immortal men and women are models of spiritual sense, drawn by perfect Mind, reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness which exceed all material sense of it.

Comeliness and beauty are not dependent on mortals. Beauty possesses those qualities before they are The divine loveliness. perceived humanly. Beauty is a thing of Life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind, and reflects the charms of His goodness in form, outline, and color. It is Love which paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with starry gems, and covers earth with loveliness.

The embellishments of the person are poor substitutes for the beauty of Spirit, shining resplendent and eternal over age and decay.

The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in