  Evil counterfeits good: it says, “I am Truth,” though [20] it is a lie; it says, “I am Love,”—but Love is spirit- ual, and sensuous love is material, wherefore it is hate instead of Love; for the five senses give to mortals pain, sickness, sin, and death,—pleasure that is false, life that leads unto death, joy that becomes sorrow. Love that is [25] not the procurator of happiness, declares itself the anti- pode of Love; and Love divine punishes the joys of this false sense of love, chastens its affection, purifies it, and turns it into the opposite channels. Material life is the antipode of spiritual life; it mocks [30] the bliss of spiritual being; it is bereft of permanence and [1] peace. When human sense is quickened to behold aright the error,—the error of regarding Life, Truth, Love as material and not spiritual, or as both material and spirit- [5] ual,—it is able for the first time to discern the Science of good. But it must first see the error of its present erroneous course, to be able to behold the facts of Truth outside of the error; and, vice versa, when it discovers the truth, this uncovers the error and quickens the true [10] consciousness of God, good. May the human shadows of thought lengthen as they approach the light, until they are lost in light and no night is there! In Science, sickness is healed upon the same Principle and by the same rule that sin is healed. To know the [15] supposed bodily belief of the patient and what has claimed to produce it, enables the practitioner to act more under- standingly in destroying this belief. Thus it is in heal- ing the moral sickness; the malicious mental operation must be understood in order to enable one to destroy [20] it and its effects. There is not sufficient spiritual power in the human thought to heal the sick or the sinful. Through the divine energies alone one must either get out of himself and into God so far that his consciousness is the reflection of the divine, or he must, through argu- [25] ment and the human consciousness of both evil and good, overcome evil. The only difference between the healing of sin and the healing of sickness is, that sin must be uncovered before it can be destroyed, and the moral sense be aroused to [30] reject the sense of error; while sickness must be cov- ered with the veil of harmony, and the consciousness be allowed to rejoice in the sense that it has nothing to mourn [1] over, but something to forget. Human concepts run in extremes; they are like the action of sickness, which is either an excess of action or not action enough; they are fallible; they are neither [5] standards nor models. If one asks me, Is my concept of you right? I reply, The human concept is always imperfect; relinquish your human concept of me, or of any one, and find the divine, and you have gained the right one—and never until then. People [10] give me too much attention of the misguided, fallible sort, and this misrepresents one through malice or ignorance. My brother was a manufacturer; and one day a work- man in his mills, a practical joker, set a man who applied for work, in the overseer's absence, to pour a bucket of [15] water every ten minutes on the regulator. When my brother returned and saw it, he said to the jester, “You must pay that man.” Some people try to tend folks, as if they should steer the regulator of mankind. God makes us pay for tending the action that He adjusts. [20] The regulator is governed by the principle that makes the machinery work rightly; and because it is thus gov- erned, the folly of tending it is no mere jest. The divine Principle carries on His harmony. |
|
