Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/377

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
349

God is Mind, and divine Mind was first chronologically, is first potentially, and is the healer to whom all things are possible. A scientific state of health is a consciousness of health, holiness, immortality — a consciousness gained through Christ, Truth; while disease is a mental state or error that Truth destroys. It is self-evident that matter, or the body, cannot cause disease, since disease is in a sense susceptible of both ease and dis-ease, and matter is not sensible. Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Tyndall, and Spencer afford little aid in understanding divine metaphysics or its therapeutics. Christian Science is a divine largess, a gift of God — understood by and divinely natural to him who sits at the feet of Jesus clothed in truth, who is putting off the hypothesis of matter because he is conscious of the allness of God — “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” Thus the great Way-shower, invested with glory, is understood, and his words and works illustrate “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Divine modes or manifestations are natural, beyond the so-called natural sciences and human philosophy, because they are spiritual, and coexist with the God of nature in absolute Science. The laws of God, or divine Mind, obtain not in material phenomena, or phenomenal evil, which is lawless and traceable to mortal mind — human will divorced from Science.

Inductive or deductive reasoning is correct only as it is spiritual, induced by love and deduced from God, Spirit; only as it makes manifest the infinite nature, including all law and supplying all the needs of man. Wholly hypothetical, inductive reasoning reckons creation as its own creator, seeks cause in effect, and from atom