CHAPTER VIII.
CREATION.
The evermore of Truth is changing the universe. Thought expands beyond expression. We are losing our swaddling clothes, asking for more light. Let there be light is the demand of Life and Truth, changing chaos to order, and discord to the music of the spheres. Progress is taking off shackles, and the finite yielding to the infinite. Advancing to a higher plane of action, thought rises from the material to the spiritual, from the mortal to the immortal, and from the personal to the impersonal idea of God.
We have the authority of holy writ that God is infinite, therefore not a person, but a divine Principle, that demands our obedience, the omnipotent Mind that governs the universe and man. Because there is but one God and many personalities, if we worshipped a person we should not worship God, but man. Three persons united in one is more suggestive of a heathen god than of Jehovah.
What is the person of God? He has no personality, being infinite; and a limitless Mind cannot proceed from personality, or limits; finity cannot present the idea of infinity. That mind would be finite that proceeded from a finite source, or the body. Mind is the only creator, and its creations are ideas. Take the microscope of spirit to discern animism, and only then can you comprehend the generic term “man.” But man is not distorted into shocking dimensions because he is the reflector of the infinite; nor is he a solitary thought, disembodied and alone. God creates all in the kingdom of Mind when He expresses man; but man is an infinite idea, ever to be developing from his infinite source. We know no more of man than we know of God. The infinite Principle, or God, is represented only by the infinite idea, or man, and the senses have no cognizance of either. Human capacities are enlarged and perfected in the proportion that we bring out the fact that man has no distinct mind from his Maker.
We have a very feeble idea of man, and a very imperfect one. God's man has an infinite range of thought, and eternal being, for he is God's entity, and express image. He is incapable of sin, sickness, or death, for God is his Life, and the unchanging Principle of his being; hence the impossibility for man to fall from his estate and be man. Jesus understood this; therefore he said: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.” This perfect model of man in the mind of Jesus lifted his being higher than our poor models of a fallen man, sick, sinning, and dying. His understanding of scientific being could never have been gained without the perfect Principle and its perfect idea, a perfect God and a perfect man forming the basis of his every thought. Building his conclusions of man from two opposite models, a good and a bad man, he could no more have arrived at the understanding of a good man than the sculptor could perfect his model when outlining the form and face of Jesus with the character of Judas in his thoughts.
| “ | Sculptors of men are we as we stand, |
| With our lives uncarved before us, | |
| Waiting the hour when at Truth's command | |
| Our life-dream passes o'er us. | |
| If we carve it then, on the yielding stone, | |
| With many a sharp incision, | |
| Its heavenly beauty shall be our own, | |
| Our lives that perfect vision.” |
The creations of the mortal and erring thought must yield to the creations of the perfect and eternal Mind. We must change our ideals to improve our models. We create a sick body with the thoughts we entertain, the models whereof are disease and death. We create sensualism and sin, bad heredity of the physical and moral, by the images or ideals of mortal thought, and not from the models of the immortal, that which is pure, perfect, and enduring. Science corrects this mistake. Metaphysics demands right thoughts to produce right actions and results. The children of metaphysicians, if they should have any, must be improved models of mortal thoughts, whereby steps shall be taken for future generations to reach the immortal and perfect model of God's thought of man. When we arrive at the point whence we gather correct views of God and man, there will be multitudinous forms of creation, and men will be as trees walking, to us mentally blind. The crude creations of the sexes will yield to the finely moulded forms of thought that we sometimes behold in the camera of mind, where the mental picture is the real and eternal. But whatever is most immortal is most real, and we know which is at the mercy of chance and change, the fading forms of matter, the fleeting thoughts of mortal mind, or the permanent and perfect forms of the immortal. We shall behold and shall understand men and women, and all the glories of earth and heaven, when we learn our way in metaphysical science up to immortality and our spiritual origin.
When we realize Life as it is, Spirit, and not matter, we shall expand into self-completeness, that finds in God all, and needs communion with nothing more to find all. Looking from this standpoint, having no other gods, and none but a spiritual origin for the universe of man, our realm of existence will be peopled with more kindred characters, men and women created of higher thoughts, not the offspring of the lowest, but of the highest qualities of mind. We shall understand this statement of creation in the exact proportion that we lay up our treasures in heaven, and not on earth, that we gravitate Godward, and our affections and aims grow spiritual, whereby we approach the broader interpretation of being, and gain some slight sense of the infinite. Here is seen the effect of the mind's ideals on health and happiness. When we are looking away from the body with such absorbed interest that we forget it, the body never gives us pain; and we are unspeakably happy if the object of our thoughts holds them with an all-absorbing love. But thoughts ever recurring to the body, talking of it, and expecting from it perpetual pleasure or perpetual pain, are educating sensualism, selfishness, and materiality, at the expense of the adornments of mind and spiritual growth. Clothing our thoughts with vestments of mortality, they cease to soar.
If Deity is personality, the forever I AM is not infinite, bounded by and narrowed into limits. It is of little consequence what the person of God is when compared with the greater question, What is this Mind, its character and divine power, that we denominate God? If Mind is both within and outside of all things, then all is Mind, and the classification is scientific. If matter were substance, Spirit, being its opposite, would be shadow. God would be the shadow of matter, and shadow could not produce substance; therefore matter would be self-created. The discord that the belief of soul in body manifests proves the theory an error. Who hath found finite life or love meeting the demands, stilling the desires, satisfying the aspirations? And if the infinite Mind was in finite person it would lose the character and qualities of God, inexhaustible Love, eternal Life, and omnipotent Truth.
The infinite Mind, to be a person, would require an infinite form to contain it, and a personal man as finite form would not be the image and likeness of God. A finite belief of God cannot take in the glories of limitless Love, Life, and Truth; hence the unsatisfied cravings for something better, higher, and holier than it affords, and its insufficiency to attain the true idea of God. The mythical creations of mortals are vague conceptions of creation, affording no foundation for the work of intelligence. Materiality cannot be made the basis of Mind. The eternal Mind creates its own likeness in the substance of ideas, and not the supposed substance of non-intelligence or matter. The Father of Mind is not the father of matter. What is termed personal sense translates spiritual ideas into material beliefs, and calls a person, instead of Principle, the Father of the rain, who hath begotten the dew, and bringeth forth Mazzaroth in His season, and guides Arcturus with his sons. Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with personal sense he takes limited views of all things. Eye hath not seen Spirit, nor ear heard his voice. We cannot reach the nature and quality of God's creations through the footsteps of mortal conceptions. Let us reverse our feeble flutterings, to follow Truth and retain life material, and above the appeal to a man-God, lift ourself to clearer views, that maketh the God-man, and we may hope to reach the standard of being. Job said: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eyes seeth Thee.” We may say that, when the supposed pains of sense predominate, and we are driven from our false estimates of life and happiness, to turn from the things of sense to the joys of Soul, the bliss of loving unselfishly, of working patiently, and conquering all that is unlike Spirit.
There can be but one Creator, He having created all. Whatever seemeth a new life or creation is a mortal thought taking to itself a belief that it is an added numeral of God; a finite sense, peering out of its cloisters with amazement, thinking to pattern the infinite. Multiplying finite thoughts, and their sense of finite substances, that we denominate material persons and things, is not creation. Personal and material man is an atom of dust thrown into the face of spiritual immensity, a flickering sense, instead of an abiding consciousness of being. We must see further than finite forms to gain the true sense of existence. And where shall we look to rest the gaze in the unsearchable realm of Mind? Let us look where we would walk, act as we would act in the possession of all power to create our own destiny. Reckoning ourself from the standpoint of a higher being, we progress spontaneously, even as light emits light, for “where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.” Distrust of our ability to gain the good we desire, and bring out better and higher aims, prevents the proof of our wings, and is defeat before we start. To accomplish a scientific sense of creation we must admit the possibility of every good achievement, and set about the discovery of what God has already done for us. Our beliefs defraud us. They make mortals involuntary creators, producing evil when they fain would create good, forming deformity when they would outline grace and beauty, injuring those they would bless; miscreators generally, whose “touch turns hope to dust.” Such is the evidence before the senses, when a birth is not desired, and a death is lamented; when the weeds grow apace in our gardens, and the flowers are choked for lack of room, or scorched by the sun, or nipped by untimely frosts. But such are not the facts of creation in the realm of Truth, and are seen only when we look from the wrong standpoints. We are egotists, fancying ourselves independent workers, material authors, and privileged originators of something that Deity would not, or could not, create.
The foundation of all mortal discord is a false sense of beginnings. To begin right is to end right. Every calculation starting from the body starts wrong. Causation rests with immortal Mind and impersonal Principle, and not with mortal mind and personality. Because we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; and for life, we find death; and for Truth, we find its opposite, error; and for Spirit, its opposite, called matter. Now reverse this action, and look to God, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality; hold thought to the harmonious and enduring, the good and true, and you will bring these into your experiences and lives, and in the proportion that they occupy your thoughts. Detaching the senses from the body, or matter, that are only attached to it through a belief, you learn the meaning of Soul, the immutable and immortal. Springing away from the mutations of time and sense, you have not lost the objects of Life, or your own identity; and if you will turn your gaze thither, you will grow as the bird that bursts the ovum and finds his wings. Beauty and blessedness of Spirit are your proofs of existence, and that whereby you should recognize yourself. This scientific sense of being, that leaves matter for Spirit, is not an absorption into Deity and the loss of man's identity, but an enlarged sphere of thought and action, an expansive benevolence, that forgets the body in remembering God and our race. The impersonal good calls on us, with the demands of every hour, to work out the problem of being through mind instead of matter. This consecrating sense of God and man lessens not our dependence on God, but heightens it; diminishes not our obligations to God, but shows the necessity of meeting them; it deteriorates not from the perfections of God, Spirit, but ascribes all to Him.
When man resigns his claims as a creator, blends his thoughts of existence with his Maker, and works only as he works, He will not grope darkly for his desires, and cling to earth because he has not tasted of heaven. Putting off the old man, we put on the new; who that has felt the loss of personal pleasures that has not gained stronger desires for impersonal joys? and this must come before he finds what belongs not to person, namely, his place in wisdom and Love. The loss of friends, or what we hold most dear of earth, has explained this ascending plane to many a heart. The pains of sense quickly inform us that its pleasures are mortal and our joys spiritual. The creations of sin bring their sure proof, in mortality, that man is not a creator of Soul or body. The sinner believes he is happier for wrong-doing, and the saint that he suffers for doing right. Both inferences are false. They are the mythical creations of sense, the transient forms that flit before mortal thoughts, to sink into oblivion.
Would existence be to you a blank without personal friends? Then the time cometh when you will be thus solitary, without sympathy, and alone; and this vacuum of the affections, filled with God, Truth, and Love, instead of man, with the impersonal instead of personal. When this hour of development comes, and you cling to your sense of personal joys, the divine Love will force you into acceptance of that which promotes your growth. Then you will meet with betrayals of friends, and personal enemies will so encompass you, the lesson will be sufficient, and man's extremity will be God's opportunity, whereby He teaches you to lay down your treasures in persons and accept the reward of Principle, and learn your way in science. Then the pains of sense are found salutary when they take away the beliefs of pleasure in sense, and transplant your affections from sense to Soul, where the creations of God are found good, rejoicing the heart. Such are the footsteps in metaphysical science, whereby Truth amputates error, and you gain your identity higher at every succeeding step. Every mortal must follow Jesus in his sayings and demonstrations up to the throne of perfect and eternal Mind, where the beliefs of matter disappear and the ideas of Spirit throng, with their beautiful presence, and flood all being with light. Spiritual understanding lifts us above frailty as we pass the barriers of limits into the evermore of Life, Truth, and Love. Immortal man co-existent with God reflects the full idea of this creation. Every object in the universe resolved into thoughts, whose substance is Mind, instead of matter, is included in the generic term man, of which woman is the highest species.
The late Professor Agassiz, in his microscopic examinations of a vulture's egg, gave strength to our conclusions of creation, which mortal belief claims and the immortal idea includes. We had made the discovery in metaphysical science that man means more than an individual outline, with mind inside of it; that he reflects the mind of God, the entire universe, every one of His creations. The late Professor Agassiz saw in the ovum of a vulture, the atmosphere, the gathering of clouds, the stars and moon, and, at the point of what is termed embryotic life, the sun appeared. Mortal beliefs of matter analyzed, whether through the microscope of physics or metaphysics, present views beyond what lies on the surface of things.
The Genesis of Spirit, God, has inverted images in mortal thoughts, for the spiritual fact is the exact opposite of the so-called material. The suns to the planets are similes of Soul, although imperfectly so, for what is termed matter presents a poor figure of Mind; it presents the exact figures of mortal beliefs, but is not a fair representative of the immortal idea. As the crude forms of mortal mind yield to higher significations, the metaphysical Genesis of the Scripture will be hailed with head and heart. The following brief comments are the spiritual or scientific version of the text: —
Genesis i. 1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
The infinite hath no beginning, and this word “beginning” is employed to signify the first, because the eternal fact of creation, when Spirit is the creator. The creative Principle is God, Life, Truth, and Love. There is but one Creator and one creation. The unfolding of spiritual ideas and their identities, forever embraced in the infinite Mind, and being reflected through time and eternity, is creation. These ideas range from a blade of grass upward to the Elohim, or sons and daughters of God, Spirit.
2. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
All is spiritual and harmonious in the eternity of Principle and its idea. In this universe of Mind, matter is unknown, without form and void. There is no supposition of the false or untrue, for darkness is upon the face of this supposition, and Truth says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. Science reveals the great fact that earth is an idea, not matter, and peopled with God's ideas, the reflections of Life in all its myriad forms of beauty, goodness, and intelligence.
3. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
The immortal and perfect Mind presents the idea of Herself first in light, and is reflected by every one of Her creations, clothed in spiritual and immortal forms. In nothing that Spirit creates is there an element or symbol of discord or decay, such as erring thought, mortal life, mutable truth, or changing love.
4. “And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
And Spirit that dwelleth in infinite light and harmony is forever reflecting the ideas of Good, and never reflects aught but what that includes; all Her creations are forever exempt from evil.
5. “And God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
All question as to whether the creations of Deity are spiritual or material should be dropped at this point of the Scriptures. The sun is not yet included in the unfolding symbols of creation, and light is seen to be the radiance of Spirit, instead of burning and material rays. The light of Spirit is Truth, and darkness is but a supposition of the absence of Truth, or error. But there is nowhere that His voice is not heard, for Truth, Life, and Love fill immensity, and are ever present. The successive appearing of ideas are represented by the uninspired writer as evening and morning, or indistinct and clearer views as the ideas appear; and this uprising thought is the morning light of God's day, forming spiritual divisions of time, periods of discovery and progress. Now we have the explanation of the Scripture, that “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years,” — that the rays of infinite Truth gathered into the foci of ideas bring more light instantaneously than a thousand years of unconcentrated beams or random thoughts and vague conjecture. The infinite and perfect Mind never created matter and called it light. To Spirit, the opposite of Spirit would be darkness; as to light, the opposite of light is darkness.
No solar rays' attraction or planetary revolutions form the day of Spirit; she makes her own records, and mortal thought is not yet recorded, and it has never known what God's thought is that we name a sun.
6. “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
And Spirit requires understanding, the mental firmament, to distinguish between the higher and lower orders of creation, and from out the solutions of thought to form identities and make the ideals glorious.
7. “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
And Spirit gives spiritual understanding to lead into all Truth to discern good, but not evil. Understanding forms the line of demonstration whereby to determine the real from the unreal. It takes of the things of Truth, Life, and Love, and shows them to thought; it gives the divine sense and spiritual signification of all things. This understanding is not intellect, or aided by scholarly attainments, but spiritual intuition. It is the dividing sense of Deity to distinguish betwixt the immortal, unerring and infinite, and a supposition of something else; or the mortal, erring, and finite, between Mind and its ideas, and the meaningless shadows of shadow which we name beliefs instead of ideas; impossible and therefore incorrect reflections, unlike their original. Spiritual understanding is a quality of God, eternal Mind, that separates thought from supposition, the assertion of nothing as something.
8. “And God called the firmament Heaven: and the evening and the morning were the second day.”
And Spirit, the eternal good, unites harmony to understanding; and the calm, cool hours of thought, and the dawn of ideas, form the second mental period.
9. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.”
And Spirit gathers the unformed thoughts into proper channels, and forms their identities, to unfold them as it opens the leaves of a rose to send abroad its fragrance.
10. “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that good.”
And Spirit gathers Her ideas into one eternal bond of union, and She feeds and clothes them all, and they rise in the scale of creation to express their Mother, and She names them all, from an atom to a world. Without their particular nature defined, they would be nameless wanderers, ebbing and flowing on the boundless shores of Mind.
11. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”
And Spirit causes the idea of creative power to reflect its Principle or Life and reproduce the images of Mind in all its multitudinous forms. But intelligence governs this multiplication of ideas; the seed or the herb yields not because of a propagating principle of its own, for it has none. Infinite Mind governs every thought, from an integral to an infinite. The artist expresses himself in his picture when he has created it, and its only immortality is in him. The creations of Spirit are ever appearing and must ever continue to unfold, from the nature of their inexhaustible source. The seed is in itself; but Mind makes the tree, the fruit, and its seed. Mind is the multiplier, thoughts and ideas are the multiplicand, the universe, and man. But there is no intelligence in the thought, the seed, or the flower. Mind is the creator and Soul of all. Truth is the intelligence of the idea.
12. “And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that good.”
And Spirit forms the gender of Her ideas. The tree is already named as having his gender and the seed in itself, but pure and perfect Mind causes it to produce; the feminine gender is not yet expressed, Mind being the only element of reproduction, and the feminine idea the highest expression of creation, it is named last in the order of creation. Ideas unfold from the lesser to the greater, but “the last shall be first” in their translation back to the spiritual Origin.
13. “And the evening and the morning were the third day.”
The third period of thought is an important one in results, wherein the indistinct, thronging forms of thought are advancing to ideas, and in the light of understanding this period corresponds to the resurrection, when Spirit is seen the Life of the grass, the herb, and tree; and Life not contingent on organization. Our Master reappeared on the third day because of this scientific sense of eternal Life and creation. The sombre hues of eventide and the rosy beams of morning corresponded to the phases of new ideas.
14. “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”
Spirit creates celestial bodies, but the bodies of the stellar universe are not more celestial than man's body. Thought rarities as it ascends. Mind forms and peoples the universe. The light of understanding gives gleams of the infinite, even as the stars indicate immensity. Hereby we learn that the continuance of mineral, vegetable, or animal is not more contingent on solar time than when the stars first sang together. The periods of understanding are the days and the seasons of Soul, wherein purity, beauty, poetry, sublimity, and the divine nature of Spirit appear.
| “ | These as they change. Almighty Father, these |
| Are but the varied God.” |
Understanding the science of creation, where all is Mind and its ideas, Jesus rebuked the material thought of his students, saying, “Ye can discern the face of the skies, but how much more should ye discern the signs of these times,” — how much more should you be a metaphysician than a materialist, one who can discern the mental signs, and in the rhythm of Spirit blend with the music of the spheres.
15. “And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.”
And Spirit imparts light to the understanding, that is reflected on all it controls.
16. “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”
And Spirit reflects the full and limitless idea of infinite Mind. Geology has never explained the earth's formations; it cannot, for Spirit created them. There is no record of solar light until time had been divided into evening and morning, and vegetation was formed, showing that light is a symbol instead of a life-giving principle. In metaphysical science it is seen that only Mind shines by Her own light and governs Her idea, man, and the universe, and governs them harmoniously. Mind forms the ideas that subdivide and radiate their borrowed light, which explains this Scripture, — “whose seed is in itself.” The ideas multiply, but Mind constitutes and creates them. This metaphysics understood shows that the sublimity and magnitude of creation, are its simplicity: He spake and it was done.
17. “And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.”
And Spirit imparts every idea of good through the understanding, and She has no other medium whereby to express in their harmony Life, Truth, and Lore. The seal of Deity is understanding, harmony, and immortality.
18. “And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that good.”
And Spirit knows that Her impress makes harmony indelible; holding creation in its spiritual classification, “no night is there.”
19. “And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”
And the faint and the full effulgence of Mind marks the advancing periods of infinite progression.
20. “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
And Spirit expresses first Her general ideas and beautiful representations of Life, corresponding to light, vegetation, flowers, trees,etc.; second, Her solid and grand ideas of Substance, corresponding to rocks and mountains; third, Her ideas of intelligence, corresponding to the animal and human species, where Mind becomes emphatic, reflecting individualized thought in the order of male and female. The fowls that fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven correspond to the aspirations that soar beyond the individual to the understanding of their creator, — reach beyond the idea to the Principle that formed it.
21. “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that good.”
And Spirit gives Her ideas great strength as they rise higher to reflect the infinite idea of omnipotent Mind. Spiritual aspirations represent Life without end, and are high and holy thoughts, — the angels that She giveth charge over thee, and which Spirit produces abundantly after their kind, while they reproduce their own characteristic acts.
22. “And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”
And Spirit blessed the multiplication of Her own ideas; good thoughts evolved from the perfect Mind, and rising higher at each annunciation.
23. “And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”
And the shifting scenes in the teeming universe of Mind make room for more exalted ideas.
24. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”
And Spirit stimulates one idea to reproduce another; she diversifies ideas, classifies and identifies them. But the intelligence and Life, yea, the immortality of the idea, is its Truth, the Principle that formed it.
25. “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that good.”
And Spirit creates all forms of thought; some to roam in the realm of Mind, joyous in their strength; others She appoints sturdy tasks; some must creep to climb, and ascend in humility the higher ideas. Moral courage is the lion of the tribe of Judah, the king of the mental realm; it roams free and fearless in the forest, or halts undisturbed in the open field; it climbs stupendous heights, or rests in “green pastures beside the still waters.” Diligence, promptness, and perseverance are “the cattle upon a thousand hills,” that carry the baggage of moral courage and keep pace with it. Patience is the harmless worm or insect that creeps slowly, but goes over summits and sticks to its achievements. Of the beasts and reptiles created by Spirit Her idea is seen in the lion, uncarnivorous, that shall lie down with the lamb, and the little child shall lead him. Tenderness shall accompany all the might that Spirit gives its formations. The serpents of Spirit are not subtle or poisonous, but wise ideas, charming with their adroitness. She hath no elements of evil or poison to impart, and every one of Her ideas is in subjection to the Mind that formed them, and can change the rod to the serpent and the serpent to the rod. Understanding this science of being, even the control that Spirit has over all created things, the prophet was safe with the lions, and the apostle with the viper, well knowing it is mind that makes forms of thought poisonous and devouring, or useful and harmless, and Life indestructible and eternal. Realizing this great truth of metaphysics — that not understood seems inconsistent — saved the prophet from the jaws of the hungry lions, and made harmless the poison-viper.
26. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
And Spirit, the eternal Us, made man. This plurality of Spirit does not imply more than one God, or three persons in one; it means Life, Truth, and Love, and these one Spirit, the divine Trinity and only Creator. “Let them have dominion” refers to the male and female ideas already created, and grouped together in this one generic term “man,” of which woman is a species. The Scriptures are sacred, but that was mythological which speaks of God creating one man, and from this man He evolved a woman, and together they made the rest of the race. Spirit creates and fashions all things spiritually, and after the likeness of God, good, and never evil. Life is reflected by Her ideas, vegetable, animal, and human, in their harmony and immortality. Truth imparts to Her own ideas the character of Truth, peace, and permanence. Love sends forth Her unselfish and enduring ideas, from the tiny grass growing beneath the foot of man, spreading for him soft carpets, and supplying food for fowl and beast, from the modest violet that lifts her blue eye to heaven and saith, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” the sheltering stone that tells of “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” up to the kindling sun, shining on all, glinting on the church-dome, glancing into the prison-cell, gliding into the sick-room, gilding the cot, brightening the flowers, beautifying the landscape, blessing the world. Spirit creates man in Her own image and likeness, even the likeness of God, good; the forever idea of Life, Truth, and Love, of intelligence, immortality, and infinity. She also causes this idea to reflect Her dominion over all things, — over fish, fowl, reptile, animal, and all the earth. This man of God, this infinite male and female idea, including all ideas, reflecting all forms of thought, male and female, co-existed with Spirit, and is forever making manifest this infinite Mother in higher forms of earth and heaven, of flowers, trees, men, women, and all the et cetera of the universe.
27. “So God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
And Spirit repeats it to emphasize this fact that man is the image or reflection of infinite Spirit, and man is the generic term for all of God's creation, masculine, feminine, and neuter. In the Icelandic, Mind and man are terms synonymous. How has this definition been adulterated by the term matter? Gender is a quality of Mind or Spirit, a reflection of Soul and not body. The male idea corresponds to creation, Life, and Truth; the female idea to Life, Truth, and Love. There are many persons and but one God, hence Deity is not person. There are many ideas, or sons and daughters of God, and but one spiritual Principle that originates them all. According to the rule of the apostle, to learn the invisible by the things that are visible, we can have no proper conception of the person of Deity except as the infinite idea of an infinite Principle named man. We have not as much authority in metaphysics for calling God masculine as feminine, the latter being the last, therefore the highest idea of Spirit.
28. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
And Spirit blesses its own idea, causes it to multiply, and governs the lower through the higher. Man is made master of the beast, the fowl, and the reptile; and governs the unformed thought, the swimmer in the sea of thought, aspiration, and every manifestation of Life, reflected from the infinite Principle of this infinite idea of intelligence.
29. “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
And Spirit, giving Her highest ideas dominion over the lower, feeds them with the sense those ideas impart in the experiences that God is Love, sustaining and blessing evermore all that Spirit creates.
30. “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is Life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”
And Spirit giveth to every idea of Her own, aspiration, humility, and immortality; and the unformed thoughts are assimilated by the higher forms that reflect them in embryo ideas of Life, Truth, and Love.
31. “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
And Spirit comprehends every idea that She creates before it is evolved, and they are perfect even as their Principle is perfect. Nothing is new to Spirit. She rests from her labors, and the hush and stir of thought is the order of scientific evolution.
Genesis ii. 1. “Thus the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them.”
Thus are the ideas of God, of perfect and infinite Mind, expressed in metaphysics, and called earth and heaven, with all that they contain; and this earth and heaven are now and forever the male and female of Spirit, alias the Elohim, or sons and daughters of God. Do you ask what is their personality? This we can no more tell you until we arrive at it, and reflect the image and likeness of Spirit, than we can state the personality of God, in the words of the apostle, “till we come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” until we reach the full idea of Life, Truth, and Love, the infinite Principle of man and spiritual creation.
2. “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all His works which God created and made.”
The unfathomable Mind is expressed in the spiritual universe or man. But this, its infinite idea, is not seen or comprehended more than its infinite Principle or God, and both are co-existent and co-eternal. The numeral of infinity, called seven days, can be reckoned only as we lay aside finite calculations and accept the computation of Scripture, that “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years.”
4. “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”
5. “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.”
Here is the emphatic declaration of Holy Writ that God creates through mind, metaphysically; that the plant grows not because of seed or soil, that Mind makes it, and mortal thought alone puts it in the ground. Mind makes every herb of the field before it grows; and Spirit, in its metaphysics or divine science, never caused a man to till the ground.
Here the inspired record closes on the subject of the real creation, and says it is finished.
We leave this brief, glorious history of the supremacy and omnipotence of Spirit, the harmony and immortality of the universe and man, and turn to the opposite supposition reluctantly, and we part with it only with our eyes. It is engraven with the point of a diamond and written with the pen of an angel on the understanding and heart. In that moment of experience, when at the portals of the unknown we found Life instead of death, and health that we never before had, we saw dimly the grand truth of those inspired pages, recording spiritual Life and its every idea, harmonious and eternal.
6. “But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.”
Here commences the mythical history of a material universe and man. The record of the creations of Life, Truth, and Love is given in the first chapter of Genesis. The second chapter states the opposite suppositions of error, and those suppositions of material sense and Life are treated by the translators as verities. The history of error or matter is not the history of Truth, but the history of falsities in contradistinction to the history of Spirit and her creations. The divine science of the first record proves the incorrectness of the second, it being the opposite of the first. And because the first embraces the harmony and immortality of all things, it is the reality of all, and its opposite or supposed material creation is the unreality. That all material life returns to its native nothingness, we have the declaration of Scripture. Matter is the god, or supposed life-giving principle, of mythological or material creation, and this supposed creation is the first idolatry or the introduction of other gods; and the results of this error are portrayed in God's glowing denunciations. The second chapter of Genesis reiterates that God, Spirit, created a second time materially what he had at first made spiritually. This is the claim of error always, — that error is Truth, and originates from Truth, even when it shows itself the exact opposite of Truth. It calls that the work of Truth and Love which produces error and hate, and is accursed in the record and the idolatry that followed this mythology. The Phœnicians' god was Baal; the Moabites', Chemosh; the Amorites' Moloch; and the Israelites', Baal. This proves they understood not the true idea of God and the offspring of Spirit. The supposed creations of matter were the results of a mist or mystification, instead of understanding; and they came from the ground instead of upward, even from the myth of matter instead of the idea of Spirit.
7. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”
The supposition that Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love, yea God, has an opposite, named “devil,” that counselled at first over Him, and succeeded then, and has ever since, through matter, error, and belief, to make those seem as real, and even more powerful than God, Spirit, is mythological. That God, Spirit, forms man from a material basis, or the “dust of the ground,” the lowest beliefs, makes him a material, unintelligent body in the first instance, and, in the second, gives this matter intelligence, puts Life, which is God, Spirit, into this body, to sin, suffer, and die, before it can be ejected therefrom and saved from the consequences. In this strange medley, Spirit, God, is supposed to lose Her divine nature, immortality and omnipotence, and Mind to become subject to matter, and Spirit, alias God, to become a mortal sinner, that is again supposed to have Truth, God, and the opposite of God, dwelling in him.
According to Cruden, the following are some of the renderings in different languages of the term man. In the Saxon: mankind, a woman, any one. French: woman, person. Welsh: that which rises up: the primary sense is from image. Hebrew; image, similitude. Icelandic: mind. The following sentence is from the Icelandic: “And God said, Let us make man after our mind; and God shaped man after His mind, after God's mind shaped He them; and He shaped them male and female.”
The evangelist says all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. As much as to say everything that was real. The spiritual and scientific Genesis declares that He saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. But the Genesis of matter contradicts this, and says God made all things over again with the help of man, and pronounced a curse upon them.
9. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” [In the Hebrew, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”]
The scientific, therefore the correct, statement of creation declares He made every plant of the field before it was in the earth. Now, the opposite of science, or the error of statement, says Life issues from matter, and contradicts the metaphysics of Spirit, God. Earth corresponds to idea, ground to belief. Out of belief are formed the personal senses, feeling, hearing, seeing, etc.; materially, the appetites and passions. The very first mention made of evil is introduced in the mythology of creation. The real creation embraces all, and has no evil. Spirit pronounces good all that She created, and says that She created all that is real. The tree of Life is the symbol of Truth. The knowledge of good and evil is the supposition there is an evil, and evil is as real as good, and created by God. This is the figurative tree of error, bearing the fruit of sin, sickness, and death.
15. “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it.”
Eden signifies harmony; in the above text, a harmonious body. This supposition commences the mythology that God put Soul, Himself, the infinite, into finite forms; put Mind into matter, to dress it and to keep it, to make it beautiful, and cause it to live and grow.
16. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Here the mythology has it that God tempts man; but St. James says, “God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” That the knowledge of evil would make men mortal is true; and that knowledge, gathered from the senses, is the only evil. But this is untrue, that God, good, created evil, or makes man from matter, or that evil is the reality of being, or that God created an evil, or serpent, to tempt his own children.
19. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
Here the mythological history presupposes Spirit repeating creation and making all things material instead of spiritual, and starting from a material basis instead of God, and given their identity, that is, named by man. In the metaphysics of creation fowls are seen as God's thoughts “flying in heaven,” moving in harmony, the aspirations or angels of His presence. Mythology presents man as material, yet a living soul, and his material thought presenting a material bird, and saying that God made it. Adam, error, forms every material sense of things, and names them accordingly. Adam, which signifies error or belief in contradistinction to understanding and Truth, is the creator of this creation. God has entered mortals according to this mythology to create, in partnership with them, in co-operation with error and belief.
21. “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and with the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”
The god of mythology, called matter, creates through mesmerism, or mortal beliefs of matter, not intelligence or understanding; and he begins his creations in darkness instead of light, and materially instead of spiritually. He produces through mortal beliefs, and saith God hath done it, that a divine Principle and understanding is producing man, male and female, anew, when it is but a belief beholding the creations of its own dream. This was the first belief of physical surgery. After the belief of Life in matter came the belief of the necessity of surgical operations, and finally the belief that men are born of women, reversing the first statement of mythological creation, namely, that woman came from man.
Genesis, iii. 1. “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made; and he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2. “And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.
3. “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”
The serpent is introduced in the scriptural record without any specified original; but some maintain he was a veritable demon, even the subtlety and climax of falsehood, created by a perfect and divine Spirit. Adam, or error, even the belief of mind in matter, began this reign of mortal man somewhat mildly, increasing in jealousy and falsehood until his days were numbered by the law of Truth, and the mortality of error made manifest. The garden was a term used to signify the body in the first records of mythology, sexuality and self-abuse the forbidden knowledge. Man was not to presume on the prerogatives of his Creator, but to recognize God the Father and Mother of all.
4. “And the serpent said unto the the woman, Ye shall not surely die;”
5. “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
This allegory represents error in every one of its beliefs, always asserting itself as Truth and over Truth; and giving the lie to Truth, saying, I can open your eyes, I can do more for you than God, good, has done. Bow down to me, have other gods, admit I am right, and more real to the senses, pleasant to the eyes, and more to be desired than Truth. The history of Adam, or error, is a dream without a dreamer; first, a supposition of assertion; second, that nothing says I am something; and, third, that something springs from nothing, and is Life, substance, and intelligence. The order of the allegory describing the mythological creation, even a creation springing from dust instead of Deity, is maintained in all its forms. Mortal man, starting from chaos or old night, from the lowest propensities; non-intelligence becoming intelligence; the basal portions of its formations of mind indicating the appetites and passions; its upper portions the sentiments, implying the hope that mind will sometime escape from matter, giving a material sense of things as the sense of mind, and matter having dominion over mind; body originating in non-intelligence, and mind afterwards inserted; the creation a propagating principle in vegetable and animal, alias God, in matter, or matter without God; a man's life consisting of the things that he eateth, and having no connection with God, Spirit; his senses unable to perceive Spirit, and matter dooming them to die. This mythological history of man, so unlike the scientific record of man as the image and likeness of God having dominion over the earth, and whose Mother is Spirit, first creates man of dust, and without a mother, afterwards gives him a mother who is governed by mesmerism, controlled by a belief called a serpent, her origin a rib, her capacity for knowledge gathered through material sense and from the tree of knowledge, whereof if a man eat he shall die, and her progeny self-constituted suicides, hastening toward death in pursuit of life. The word Adam, divided into two syllables, and reading A damn, indicates more closely the character and the curse that the divine Spirit or mother of man bestowed upon it.
9. “And the Lord God called unto Adam, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
Knowledge gathered from a personal sense of either man or God produces its immediate fruits in fear and shame. Error, ashamed of the reality it makes of material sense, shrinks from the voice of Truth calling to belief, Where art thou? Art thou a supposed sense of matter, a sense of evil instead of good? Fear is the first manifestation of the belief of personal sense, and the foundation of all other beliefs, even sin, sickness, and death. This allegorical man was naked, but knew it not until belief looked through eyes to find man, and the senses material, instead of spiritual, defined God's idea.
11. “And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?”
12. “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”
Here error repeats the old story that Truth is the origin of a lie, and God makes man materially as well as spiritually charging God with the creation of evil as well as good. Not God, but a serpent, a lie, introduced such ruinous knowledge. Even the allegory does not claim that God made the serpent or first lie that beguiled the woman, that demoralized the man. Mortal error, the Adam, charges Eve and God with man's dereliction; it saith, “The woman whom Thou gavest me hath done this; that which was taken from my rib has made me a sinner; the very bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh results ill; beliefs of matter are betraying me. But Truth questioned the woman regarding the knowledge she had imparted, and found her honest in her reply, that “the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” The woman was first to see her way out of the difficulty, to learn that knowledge obtained through the senses is not a safe guide, and is the first to abandon the belief that life originates materially, and receive a sense of spiritual being as demonstrated by our Master at the sepulchre. She should be first to reflect the All Mother, or the Womanhood of God, in the spiritual idea of Love.
15. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bite his heel.”
The Apostle Paul explains this self-constituted war between matter and Spirit, the senses and Soul; between the mythological life of matter and the Life that is God, Spirit. He says: “The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit dwelleth in” (with) “you.” As in ages past, there will be again greater opposition to the metaphysics or science of the Scriptures than to any known sect. The seed of Truth and the seed of error, the seed of belief and that of understanding, yea, the seed of Spirit and that of matter, are the wheat and the tares that time and Truth arc separating, to destroy the one and bring to light the facts of the other in the spiritual Life and creation. When Truth shall bruise the head of error, to destroy the belief of intelligence in matter, this belief, or original serpent, shall bite the heel of Truth, even as it hath ever done at every period of reform.
16. “Unto the woman He said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
Truth deals its first blow upon personal sense, the belief of sensation, life, or intelligence, from a material basis. It strikes at the foundations of mythological creation and idolatry, — the first and foremost error of having more than one God, one creator, and one creation, — showing the results of this belief in sin, sickness, and death. Hence the stress that Jesus laid on this commandment, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
17. “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”
18. “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;”
19. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Here it is shown that material man is governed by person instead of Principle, by body instead of Soul, by belief instead of understanding; yea, by animal magnetism, rather than metaphysical science. And because the woman was not created or governed by Spirit, God, but created from man, and governed by mortal mind, she accepted false knowledge, believed a lie, concluded that Life and happiness belonged to the so-called personal senses, and the objects that those senses create. This error is mortal, of few days, and full of trouble; its supposed pleasures have pain, even as its rose has a thorn. Limits encompass the belief, and hedge its achievements about with difficulties, sharp points.
It presents only the immature, or material thought, and not the idea of God. Through toil, struggle, and sorrow, it arrives at understanding when the belief gives up its dead, even the illusion of life in matter, and this supposed mortal man returns to the ground, the oblivion of nothingness, and the supposition that error is mind is proved an illusion, and the great Truth that Mind is God, and there is but one Mind, is found out.
22. “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:”
23. “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
24. “So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
Evil was not given a local habitation or a name in the first chapter of God's Genesis, the spiritual creation, where all is good and there is no evil; for God, Good, has produced all, and cannot produce evil; hence the mythology of evil, that has taken the name of God in vain, and even claims that Truth and Love can shut out man from the presence of God, from partaking of Life eternal. The law of God saith, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.” The error or belief of life in matter excludes itself from harmony, for sin is its own punishment. The myth and idolatry of belief must plough its own soil. Any theory having gods of matter, and more than one God or Mind, starting man a non-intelligence, and claiming that Deity, Spirit, enters finite forms, and they become gods according to the serpent, or first lie, must carry itself to the ground. No one can reasonably doubt that this record was intended by the inspired writers as an allegory depicting the falsity of the supposition that Spirit creates matter, sin, sickness, or death. Revealed theology, or the divine science of God, man, and creation, as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, is glorious, soul-inspiring, a blessed benediction on man. But those writers never designed us to accept the Scriptures in a material or literal sense only, but in their spiritual and metaphorical meanings. We cannot understand the foregoing text as literal without impugning the Divine Love that made man and gave him earth for a possession, and blest it for his sake. The literal meaning of this text would imply malice, God withholding from man the opportunity to reform lest he should improve it and become better. But this is not our God, the mother-love, unquenchable, seeking not her own, but another's good. Truth and Love literally drive error out of all selfhood; but this blesses man, and they place the cherub of wisdom at the easterly gate, at the luminous portal of thought, where the light of spiritual understanding and the two-edged sword, or radiant sense of Truth and justice, guard the life that reflects God's image and likeness. This figure is to make the distinction between the immortal and unerring mind, or Life, Truth, and Love, and the mortal and erring between Soul and sense, Spirit and matter, showing they blend not in the divine science of being. Also that the spiritual and divine is Mind, and the human, or material, is belief. The figure employed in the New Testament, of the wise men coming from the east, represents the correspondence of wisdom to light. The sun, giving light and heat to the earth, is figurative of the divine Principle that is Life and Love, governing the universe and man. The tree of Life signified in metaphor the realities of being, the tree of knowledge, the unreal error, evidence obtained from what is termed material sense, although there can be no such sense, and the real must be the spiritual, for that alone represents God. Sin, sickness, or death, has no history in creation when God created heaven, earth, and man. Until the allegory introduces a falsity, alias serpent, that instructed man to turn from Soul to sense, or the body, for good and evil also, — evil had no history. The tree of Life is guarded in the metaphor by the light of spiritual understanding, from the touch of mortality or error.
Genesis, iv. 1. “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.”
The term Adam is used in Hebrew as “original sin,” error; Eve, as “beginning,” plainly indicating that mortals have a beginning and end, whereas immortal man coexists with his Maker. The beginning of error was the opposite of Truth's process of creation. It is a supposition of material life, starting from man in contradistinction to spiritual Life, that hath no beginning or ending. The claim, I have gotten a man from the Lord, if the term Lord is used as Deity, deceives in the origin of mortal man, and presupposes that God is the author of the sin of the progeny of Adam and Eve. Here evil says, I am good; matter, that I am mind; life, that I am death; and the misconception of creation says the offspring of sin, sickness, or death are in sympathy with a law of Life. The result of this false statement of the origin of mortals prove it an offspring of error that was a fratricide. Error began at once in belief to sap the foundations of immortality, presupposing there is Mind, substance, Life, and Truth, apart from God; then attempting to govern Life, God, by creating or destroying it; then concluding Life is a self-destructive property of matter, that goes to decay according to the law of Life. There is no standard of God, Good, of Spirit, of Life, or of Truth, if they produce their opposites, namely, matter, evil, error, and death. Good never gave man an element of evil, and he had nothing underived from God; hence, man had no basis for going wrong, no propensity or power to do evil. Again, God, Spirit, has never lost Her government over Her creations. The snake was simply a figure of falsity, and God sentenced the lie it was supposed to utter, cursing it above all cattle or “beasts of the field,” dooming it beyond all burden-bearers or brutes, and making it lick the dust. In the record this error is pronounced mortal. The supposition, namely, that eternal God enters into partnership with mortals, that Truth and error commingle in creation, is not only a self-evident falsity, but referred to by our Master as such. Disputing these points with the rabbis, and arguing for the opposite science of creation, he said of this error, “You were a liar from the beginning, and the truth abode not in you.” And Paul argues, “What communion hath light with darkness, or what concord hath Christ with Belial?” The scientific origin of Jesus as the son of God gave him great power to propound the facts of creation, and to demonstrate his understanding of the One Mind, that forms and governs man and the universe.
The great facts of scientific being formed the basis of Jesus' origin, and his wisest of all teachings, and his highest of all demonstrations. He was the son of God, showing that God, Spirit, creates not a wicked, an unwise, or a mortal man, that can lapse into sin and sensualism, but reproduces the eternal standards, and destroys sin, sickness, and death, instead of creating those. If the prophet Isaiah said, The Lord creates peace, and he makes evil, he referred to the divine law meeting the human; and, before reducing evil to its native nothingness, reproducing its worst symptoms, disturbing its muddy foundations, to wash them forever away. In this moral chemicalization we may say in our ignorance the aggravation of moral symptoms is evil, and the Lord did it, but we ought to know that God, Good, cannot produce evil. What would we say of the musician whose harmony is acknowledged above all others, and yet distinguished for its discords as well as concord? Metaphysics “renders to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's.” It says to human discord, to sin, sickness, and death, God never made you, and you are falsities, not facts. The startling picture of error and the seductions of sense should lesson mortals never to turn the gaze away from Spirit to matter for happiness or Life.
3. “And Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.”
Cain is used in the metaphor as the type of mortal and material belief, that would murder the idea of Truth, looking for it in matter. Brought from the ground, taking from a material basis all its positions, from creeds, hygiene, materia medica, etc., and from this basis it would make an offering to God. But Abel took his offering from the firstlings of the flock, that which first prefigured Life and intelligence; he ascribed to Mind more than Cain did. He was nearer the primitive belief before it partook of knowledge gained from the so-called personal senses, and said mind is in the body, and plunged headlong into error. Cain's offering had less indications of life or mind whereby to typify Deity. It was gathered from figures more inanimate; hence his attempt to take away life or mind, and destroy a higher offering to Mind.
4. “And the Lord had respect unto Abel, and to his offering:”
5. “But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect.”
God hath more respect to mortal mind than matter, for thoughts, sooner than herbs, are turned away from the ground, their low basis. Also, the error or belief of intelligence in matter is more pliant in infancy, its firstlings, than the adult stage, when it brings forth evil fruits, and offers the most vapid thoughts, and careless, to God, paying homage to Spirit through matter more than mind.
8. “Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.”
And the sensualism of the belief that life, substance, and intelligence are matter, slays innocence and the brotherhood of man.
9. “And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?”
Here the serpentine lie goes on that said knowledge obtained from the senses makes man as gods. The first-fruits of sensualism was to kill, through envy, the offerings, of purity and innocence, and lie about life and its responsibilities.
10. “The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.”
The error or belief that murders other beliefs more innocent than itself prefigures the slaying of the idea of Truth; and, though it hides behind a lie, and forms excuses for guilt, it cannot forever conceal itself. Truth will find it out through her eternal laws. The suffering sin brings will betray it. Truth sets upon it the mark of suffering. The motive to excuse error, or to conceal it, shall be found out and punished.
11. “And now art thou cursed from the earth.”
The belief that hides itself from justice, and denies truth, is cursed by its own act, for it perpetuates error, that needs to be destroyed, and prevents man's progress and control over the body.
15. “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
Whatever belief strives to prevent the normal results of Truth revealing and destroying error, Truth will punish seven-fold, accord it the full penalty, for the error it is and the error it maintains. It receives the penalty due two sins instead of one. Justice marks the occasion, for we shall be taught not to slay the waymarks of Truth and justice. The serpentine malice, secretiveness, and lie, that kills to cover its faults, destroys itself with agony more than it can bear, and yields to Truth.
16. “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod.”
A misconception of Life and Love, of man and creation, is doomed at length to fall back upon itself, having no God to support it. Nod is used in the original text as Cain, showing that error is a suicide, and has no connection with Truth. After murdering everything else in belief, it goes back to itself, returns to dust, nothingness. But man is not lost. The idea of Truth appears the sooner for error's demise; then man is understood coexistent and coeternal with God. The supposition that man is material is shut out by divine science from the presence of Truth, to dwell in its own error, even envy, malice, and dreamland, until it learns that matter and evil are illusion, mistakes, and not facts. Nod and Cain signify beliefs, but not qualities of Mind. They are misstatements and suppositions; yea, nothing, as the opposite of something, that God, something, never created. If man is material, and originates in an egg, who shall say that, according to Mr. Darwin, a monkey is not his great-grandfather?
Infinite and eternal Mind, yea, Spirit, made all that was made, and Her modus and creation was evidently metaphysical. “He made the plant before it was in the ground,” and “every herb before it grew.” What is termed mineral, vegetable, and animal, are God's ideas, things of thought. Matter was not created from Mind. An egg is not the origin of man. God creates all, and there is nothing left for man or for matter to create. In metaphysics we find the ideas of Truth support the manifestation of Life, and the Truth of man makes man immortal, whereas the belief that matter supports life would make man mortal, however much he may eat. That sentence in Scripture, “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,” indicates that the opposite supposition of material creation God, Spirit, had no participation in. After the scientific creation it had not rained, “and there was not a man to till the ground.” Mind, instead of matter, was the producer, and life was self-sustained. As matter-substance, all is mortal; but as Principle and idea, all is eternal. Birth, decay, and death are seen only through a material sense, and there is no material sense, hence its objects are falsities. Man's life consisteth not in the things that he eateth. Matter cannot change the eternal fact that man is because God is. Nothing is new to the infinite understanding.
Mind can no more produce matter than matter can produce mind, and mortal mind has neither capacity, right, nor power to create or to destroy; all is in the hands of Spirit. The first mention made of evil, or more than one God, was in the falsehood or fable of the serpent. It was not named in the facts of creation. It was in the fable that a serpent said, “Ye shall be as gods,” and these gods shall be material men to distinguish them from a spiritual personality or Deity. But a material person is not the image and likeness of a spiritual person, and evil is not the likeness of good; hence, the man in the fable is neither a god, nor the image and likeness of one. Only because a belief can reverse every position of understanding and truth does it name the Supreme Being masculine instead of feminine, and declare that Mind can be manifested in or as matter, and Life, the infinite, enter a man's nostrils. Beginning with person, instead of Principle, we explain Deity through mortal and finite figures. “Behold the man is become as one of us,” was not the utterance of Truth or science when the model of man was fast deteriorating, according to the record, and man was never God. Mortal mind is sentenced to till the ground, to improve itself and the body, whereas man is given dominion over earth and control over the body, because he has but one Mind, and that is God. A material Mind and a material universe, evolved from and expressing Mind, are anomalous, their beginning and end error, in premises and conclusions, that accord neither place nor privilege to Deity. Error tills the whole ground in this theory; all is wrought on a material platform, and the false side of the question of Life and happiness. Outside of science the formula of mortal thought is a vague hypothesis, demanding to be blessed when it must be punished, self-destroyed.
The translators of the scientific creation have been mortal and material thoughts, from the standpoint of error attempting to define Truth, beliefs of Life and intelligence in matter attempting to cope with the nature and modus of Spirit never in matter; hence the apparent discrepancies of the Scriptures, that are glorious in their true sense. Truth has but one reply to error: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” As in Adam, error, all died, so in Christ, Truth, shall all be made alive. The mortality of man is a myth, for man is immortal. The belief that the Spirit of man is submerged in matter, to grow out of it, is all that is mortal. But God never germinated. Spirit is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. If Spirit imparts error, then Spirit is error, and we have lost the nature of Deity. Dust is not the image and likeness of Spirit, and man is not God. We should be shocked at the contradictions of science throughout all its statements in any other than a moral direction, and shall we deny science to God, the divine Principle of creation? The mist that went up from the ground, alias the darkness of supposition and superstition, would take the explanation of God and man out of the hands of science and give it to a material sense.
Why the Genesis and Revelations of the Scriptures seem more obscure than other portions is because they are more impossible to interpret from a material standpoint. To me they are the transparencies of the Bible. The infancy of metaphysics lisps to an unconscious age the great Truth of being; and perceiving one of its ideas, and not another, you may call that science which is but a part of it. The proof of our metaphysics declares its validity. If mathematics presents a thousand different examples, and one of those proves the rule, all are equally authenticated. When a single statement of our metaphysics is proven, every one is proven; for each one will be found to correspond with the Principle of metaphysics when this Principle is understood. If we have given to you, dear readers, as you all can prove on learning it, the science of metaphysics in healing the sick, we also have given you the correct metaphysical version of the foregoing texts.
Mr. Darwin's system of evolution, from a material basis, defines, more strictly than most theories, the material history of mind, or the following self-evident error, — the supposition that matter is self-creative, or that mind needs matter to create the universe and man, or that mind can create matter, or that man was evolved from Mind yet formed of dust, and woman evolved from his side and mind introduced afterwards, and the rest of the race starts from an egg. This material evolution of error has its radical statement by Mr. Darwin, through which the universe and man are supposed to start from matter, as the First Cause, else from mind to become matter, then matter to become intelligent and result in mind again.
Far be it from us to touch irreverently the sacred Scriptures. We aim only to divide their first record of Truth from the second record of error, and to give the spiritual sense of creation. We cannot doubt the inspired direction of thought when it leaves a material, sensual, and mortal basis for the spiritual and immortal idea of God. We cannot doubt that we have gained the spiritual sense of the Scriptures when this sense lifted us out of disease and saved us from death. Standing at the threshold of spiritual being we behold the falsity of material things, and “the Spirit and the bride say, Come, and whosoever will, let him drink of the waters of Life freely.” Humbly as fervently we join grateful issue with the science of being that forever separates Adam, error, from the record and presence of Truth, and breathes through the understanding the spiritual sense of Life, substance, and intelligence as Spirit, not matter. Through the atmosphere of Soul we discern man as the image and likeness of God, who has never lost his spiritual estate or eternal harmony. But who will believe our report? The sun gives little warmth or brightness when the clouds cover it, and darkness seemeth its pavilion. So metaphysics, that is seen only as sense is hushed, gives little joy and light until Life is learned spiritually. Every agony of mortal error helps destroy it, and aids us in the apprehension of immortal Truth. This is the new birth whereby it is understood that man is the idea of God and harmony, the spiritual sense of being.
Treating of the origin of mortal man, Professor Agassiz said, “It is very possible that many general statements current now about birth and generation will be changed with the progress of information.” Had the great naturalist, through his tireless researches, gained the science of being as it is, wholly apart from growth and organization, that ardent mind would have continued longer with us to bless the race. History is indebted to his labors and genius for much material history. His discoveries have brought to light important points in what is termed embryotic life. That butterfly, bee, and moth propagate their species without the male element corroborates our metaphysics, showing that the origin and continuance of insects rests on a principle apart from material conditions. What we name material life, germinating in an egg, then growing, maturing, and decaying, will finally give place to higher conceptions, and obedience to the higher order of generation. Animals of lower organisms that combine three methods of reproduction, and multiply by eggs, buds, and self-division, become less discordant, less sickly and sinning, in proportion as they have less mortal mind, showing it is the gross mind that makes the gross body.
According to Professor Agassiz, successive generations do not begin with the birth of new individuals, but with the formation of the egg whence these individuals proceed; and we must look upon the egg as the starting-point of the complicated structure of man. Here his deep researches into material structure culminate in logic, and with less hypothesis than generally attends such theorems. His discoveries are footsteps towards metaphysics. He has bearded error in its den; shown the origin of material man, not Mind, God, but the very opposite of God, even a circumscribed egg, non-intelligent and lifeless. Whatever life or supposed intelligence accompanies the phenomenon of mortality, a material man or animal is God outside the individual, which is but an inverted image seen through the lens of belief. But what availeth it to investigate this so-called life, that begins and ends, even as it began, a nameless nothing, — a dream and illusion, from which to waken gives a clearer sense of being and its continuance. Error of thought is reflected in error of action. A constant contemplation of life materially hides spiritual Life and trails our standards in the dust. If Life has a starting-point, immortality is a myth: commencing at a given point we reach a terminus. If, as the Scriptures declare, Life is God, an egg were a narrow boundary for Deity. Embryology gives no instance of one species producing its opposite species, a serpent germinating a bird, or a lion a lamb. Such amalgamation would be deemed monstrous, but not more so in reality than for Spirit, God, the pure and holy, immutable and immortal, to originate the impure and mortal, and for Spirit to produce matter.
Science repudiates such a thought; and the self-evident falsity of material sense must father it, because it is unnatural, impossible, and unreal.
Mind produces or is produced: but if Mind is first it cannot produce matter, and if matter is first it cannot produce mind. Intelligence germinates not the unintelligent. Like produces like. Matter is neither cause nor effect. All is Mind, matter is but a supposition, a dream without a dreamer, there being but one Mind, even God; and God is not a dreamer. In natural history the bird is not the immediate product of a beast; in scientific history matter is not the progenitor of beast or bird.
Professor Agassiz argues that mortals spring from eggs and races. Mr. Darwin says that man comes up through all the lower grades of being, and must be a monkey before he can be a man. The latter may be right relative to material methods, but he does not acknowledge that matter and its methods are without any real basis, — the mere suppositions of mortal mind, the baseless fabrics of a dream. Professor Agassiz asks, What can there be of a material nature transmitted through these bodies called eggs, — themselves composed of the simplest material elements, — by which all peculiarities of ancestry belonging to either sex are brought down from generation to generation? The question of the naturalist is, How can matter originate or transmit mind, its very antipodes? It cannot; darkness and doubt encompass the thought that holds creation on a material basis. From a material stand-point, who, by searching, can find out God? All must be Mind, else all must be matter; the one never produced the other. Mind is immortal, but we see the material seed rot to propagate, and the poor germ doomed to the same result. The answer to the ancient question, Which is first, the egg or the parent that takes care of it? is given when we admit the egg produces the parent. But we cannot stop there, another question follows: Who or what produced the egg?
It was an ancient theory that earth was hatched from the egg of night. Heathen philosophy, modern geology, and every material hypothesis, deal with causation as contingent on matter, and apparent to a material sense, even where the proof requisite to sustain their assumptions disappear in the spiritual fact. Material theories make friends of sin, sickness, and death, whereas the spiritual facts of being include not one of those. Our experience of what is termed life, substance, and intelligence, starting from an egg, corresponded with Job's, until we learned a little out of this supposed life, pecked our shell with metaphysics, and looked upward. From a material source flow no remedies for its own sorrows, sin and death; and the power is not in material man's origin, an egg or dust, to remedy those ills.
Thought loosened from its material basis produces blended tints of leaf and flower, and the order of matter is found the order of mortal mind in all its vagaries. The intermixing of different species, urged to its final limits, results in the original species; and thus it will be found out that matter results in what is termed mortal mind, a lie that was its origin, and must finally yield its claims, when matter will disappear, and perfect and eternal Mind be the only Mind, and man's origin be discovered. Professor Agassiz has given the origin of mortal and material man; he has traced what we term animal existence through various stages of embryology, and with most important observations, that should awaken thought to the higher and purer contemplation of man's origin in God that must precede the understanding and harmony of being. Thought must find an improved basis, get nearer the truth of being, or health will never become universal, and harmony and immortality be the standard of man.
One of our ablest naturalists has said, “We have no right, to assume that individuals have grown or been formed under circumstances that made material conditions essential to their maintenance and reproduction, or important to their origin and first introduction.” Why, then, does the naturalist base all his reasonings materially, give his inferences, and take his deductions, all from matter?
Adam was created before Eve, therefore the maternal egg never propagated Adam; and Eve was formed from his rib instead of an egg. Should mortal mind adopt the appearing of a star for its formula of creation, the advent of mortal man would be signalled by a star. When mortal belief fixes upon an egg for the origin of man, this condition supersedes the original rib. Do you say man was formed before he knew his origin, then how has a belief affected the result? Because mortal man is this belief, and is ignorant of it, unconscious even of himself in infancy; and when he grows to self-consciousness he says, I am a boy, but who made me? And belief replies, God made you. Now we have the first statement, or the origin of error and belief imputing to God, Spirit, the creation of matter and all that is sinful and mortal. Infinite understanding never created a belief. And Jesus defined this opposite of God better than we can, saying, “When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.” Jesus defined the term “devil” when he said, “I have chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil.” This term he applied to Judas, not to any individuality outside of him; and he never said that God made a Judas, but “Ye are of your father, the devil,” another mortal belief called mortal man, that is the author of itself.
In the first chapter of Genesis the word “God” is used wholly. In the second chapter, where error is stated in contradistinction, and its creations given a history, the word “Lord” is introduced. As the belief of Deity is expressed by human thought, it is given the appellative of a man. The term “Lord” was an honorary title, such as Sarah gave her husband, etc. An individual said to us, “I like your explanations of Truth, but I cannot understand error, and how there can be a belief without a believer.” We answered, “The belief is the believer, and vice versa. But you want to make error an intelligence, as real and as much God-created as truth, and give it entity and power.” No one can understand error and the metaphysics of Truth who makes it a consideration either in creation, Life or Mind. Searching for the origin of man's Life is searching after the origin of God, the self-existent and eternal. The belief that would unite spirit and matter, good and evil, immortality and mortality, in one, and call this unity a man, created both by God and man, Good and evil, and made of but one portion of what constitutes him, is a self-evident error. The explanation of man and his origin rests on a spiritual basis, and none other. And we have lost all evidence of, or proper conceptions regarding, Deity, and are without a standard of perfection when we admit that the perfect is the author of what becomes imperfect, that God gives the power to sin, that Truth gives error ability to be error.
Our great ensample, Jesus, restored the phenomenon of Life with the understanding that God is the Life; there fore Life is indestructible. Had he believed that Life is in or of matter, he could not have presented himself unchanged after the crucifixion, or have raised the so-called dead. Spirit imparts spirituality. Truth germinates the idea of Truth, and not the belief of error. That which is real is illuminated and sustained by Spirit. Vertebrates, articulates, mollusks, and radiates are material formations only to the senses. Mortal thoughts, classified and called matter, are supposed to possess life and mind, while they are nothing more than technicalized beliefs, that will disappear when the radiates of Spirit destroy forever the belief of matter. Then shall appear the new heaven and new earth, for the former things shall have passed away. Nothing is new except as the eternal is new to the temporal.
A belief fulfils the conditions of a belief, and dies to live again, until it learns that Life is not gained through death.
This subject will absorb the attention of sage and philosopher, but the Christian alone can fathom it, who understands, better than all others, the Life that is God. From the deep sleep that fell upon Adam there came a new creation. But in sleep, cause and effect are beliefs, only that which seemeth and is not; yea, dreams, instead of realities come of sleep, and this Adam-dream is what we term mortal and material life.
The ontology of metaphysics receives but little attention at this period, but mortal mind must waken to revolve this question in thought until it is seen from a new standpoint. It is related of a father who was anxious to try an experiment on his child that he kept an infant a few hours old under water several minutes, repeating this experiment daily until the infant could remain under water twenty minutes at one time, and move about in play. Parents should understand how to develop their offspring mentally aright. Mind controls embryology in the universe without pain to the plant, and the less mind the less pain in propagating, until this mind or propagator relinquishes the belief “That in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” The longevity of mortal man will increase as metaphysics is understood. At the expiration of seven thousand years from the advent of Adam, error, when the science of being has rolled back the darkness of belief with the light of understanding, it shall lift the curtain on paradise, and man be found having dominion over all the earth.
Scholastic theology takes up the history of man from the second chapter of the Old Testament; but we find the science of God, the universe, and man in the spiritual Genesis of the first chapter of the Old Testament.