Page:Miscellaneous Writings.djvu/52

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26
MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

cine, or religion, can survive the wreck of time; but whatever is of God, hath life abiding in it, and ultimately will be known as self-evident truth, as demonstrable as mathematics. Each successive period of progress is a period more humane and spiritual. The only logical conclusion is that all is Mind and its manifestation, from the rolling of worlds, in the most subtle ether, to a potato-patch.

The agriculturist ponders the history of a seed, and believes that his crops come from the seedling and the loam; even while the Scripture declares He made “every plant of the field before it was in the earth.” The Scientist asks, Whence came the first seed, and what made the soil? Was it molecules, or material atoms? Whence came the infinitesimals, — from infinite Mind, or from matter? If from matter, how did matter originate? Was it self-existent? Matter is not intelligent, and thus able to evolve or create itself: it is the very opposite of Spirit, intelligent, self-creative, and infinite Mind. The belief of mind in matter is pantheism. Natural history shows that neither a genus nor a species produces its opposite. God is All, in all What can be more than All? Nothing: and this is just what I call matter, nothing. Spirit, God, has no antecedent;, and God's consequent is the spiritual cosmos. The phrase, “express image,” in the common version of Hebrews i. 3, is, in the Greek Testament, character.

The Scriptures name God as good, and the Saxon term for God is also good. From this premise comes the logical conclusion that God is naturally and divinely infinite good. How, then, can this conclusion change, or be changed, to mean that good is evil, or the creator