Soul.
WE read in the Hebrew Scriptures, “The Soul that sinneth, it shall die.”
What is Soul? Is it a reality within the mortal body? Who can prove that? Anatomy has not descried nor described Soul. It was never touched by the scalpel nor cut with the dissecting-knife. The five physical senses do not cognize it.
Who, then, dares define Soul as something within man? As well might you declare some old castle to be peopled with demons or angels, though never a light or form was discerned therein, and not a spectre had ever been seen going in or coming out.
The common hypotheses about souls are even more vague than ordinary material conjectures, and have less basis; because material theories are built on the evidence of the material senses.
Soul must be God; since we learn Soul only as we learn God, by spiritualization. As the five senses take no cognizance of Soul, so they take no cognizance of God. Whatever can not be taken in by mortal mind — by human reflection, reason, or belief — must be the unfathomable Mind, which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard.” Soul stands in this relation to every hypothesis as to its human character.
If Soul sins, it is a sinner, and Jewish law condemned the sinner to death, — as does all criminal law, to a certain extent.
As Spirit, Soul is immortal, because Spirit is God. Hence as Spirit, Soul never sins. Spirit is Life. Hence there is, there can be, no spiritual death.
Transcending the evidence of the material senses, Science declares God to be the Soul of all Being, the only Mind and Intelligence in the universe. There is but one God, one Soul, or Mind, and that one is infinite, supplying all that is absolutely immutable and eternal, — Truth, Life, Love.
Science reveals Soul, as that which the senses can not define from any standpoint of their own. What the physical senses miscall Soul, Christian Science defines as Material Sense; and herein lies the discrepancy between the true Science of Soul, and that material sense of a soul which that very sense declares can never be seen or measured or weighed or touched by physicality.
Often we can elucidate the deep meaning of the Scriptures by reading sense instead of soul, as in the Forty-second Psalm: “Why art thou cast down oh my soul [sense]? . . . Hope thou in God [Soul], for I shall yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance and my God [my Soul, Immortality].”
The Virgin Mother's sense being uplifted to behold Spirit, as the sole origin of man, she exclaimed, “My soul [sense] doth magnify the Lord.”
Human language constantly uses the word soul for sense. This it does, under the delusion that the senses can reverse the spiritual facts of Science; whereas Science reverses the testimony of the senses.
Soul is Life, and being Spiritual Life, never sins. Material sense is the so-called material life. Hence this lower sense sins and suffers, according to material belief, till divine understanding takes away this belief, and restores Soul, or Spiritual Life. “He restoreth my Soul,” says David.
In his First Epistle to the Corinthians (xv. 45) Paul writes: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last man Adam, a quickening Spirit.” The Apostle refers to the second Adam as the Messiah, our blessed Master, whose interpretation of God and His creation — by restoring the spiritual sense of man, as immortal instead of mortal — made humanity victorious over death and the grave.
When I discovered the power of Spirit to break the cords of matter, through a change in the mortal sense of things, then I discerned the last Adam as a quickening Spirit, and understood the meaning of the declaration of Holy Writ, “The first shall be last,” — the living Soul shall be found a quickening Spirit; or, rather, shall reflect the Life of the Divine Arbiter.
