Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/151

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Anthropology.
143

and, behold, I am alive for evermore (Science has explained me).”[1]

It is impossible for Mrs. Eddy to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, because the body per se is an evil. Jesus therefore in coming into the highest glory must have gotten rid of it. If he had departed from it while it was in the tomb he would not have returned to it. So there was no separation of soul and body in the time from the crucifixion to the morning of the so-called resurrection. She will not accept the fact of the resurrection and yet she will hold to the Bible. So she attempts to patch up this difficulty in the above fashion. She interprets the Bible according to her philosophy.

But Spinoza disposes of Christ's resurrection in the same way and from the same philosophic necessity. He says: “I accept Christ's passion, death, and burial literally, as you do, but His resurrection I understand allegorically. I admit, that it is related by the Evangelists in such detail that we cannot deny that they themselves believed Christ's body to have risen from the dead.”[2] What he means by “allegorically” is explained elsewhere thus: “I therefore conclude, that the resurrection of Christ from the dead was in reality spiritual, and that to the faithful alone, according to their understanding, it was revealed that Christ was endowed with eternity, and had risen from the dead (using dead in the


  1. S. and H. p. 334.
  2. Letter, 25.