Page:Miscellaneous Writings.djvu/199

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EXTRACTS FROM SERMON
173

Ancient and modern philosophy, human reason, or man's theorems, misstate mental Science, its Principle and practice. The most enlightened sense herein sees nothing but a law of matter.

Who has ever learned of the schools that there is but one Mind, and that this is God, who healeth all our sickness and sins?

Who has ever learned from the schools, pagan philosophy, or scholastic theology, that Science is the law of Mind and not of matter, and that this law has no relation to, or recognition of, matter?

Mind is its own great cause and effect. Mind is God, omnipotent and omnipresent. What, then, of an opposite so-called science, which says that man is both matter and mind, that Mind is in matter? Can the infinite be within the finite? And must not man have preexisted in the All and Only? Does an evil mind exist without space to occupy, power to act, or vanity to pretend that it is man?

If God is Mind and fills all space, is everywhere, matter is nowhere and sin is obsolete. If Mind, God, is all-power and all-presence, man is not met by another power and presence, that — obstructing his intelligence — pains, fetters, and befools him. The perfection of man is intact; whence, then, is something besides Him that is not the counterpart but the counterfeit of man's creator? Surely not from God, for He made man in His own likeness. Whence, then, is the atom or molecule called matter? Have attraction and cohesion formed it? But are these forces laws of matter, or laws of Mind?

For matter to be matter, it must have been self-created.