This error led to bad results. Its life was found to be not Life, but only a transient sense of sin, that ends in death. Error charged its lie to Truth, and said: “The Lord knows it, — He made man mortal and material, out of matter instead of Spirit;” and thus error partook of its own evil, with this Amen.
When the eternal Spirit made man, he was given dominion over all the earth; and he was never created from a material basis, or bidden to obey material laws that Spirit never made. His government is the higher law of Mind, the spiritual statute. Jesus, understanding spiritual law, and knowing there is no law of matter, said: “These signs shall follow them that believe: Unharmed they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.” But this understanding of man's power, equipped by Spirit, has sadly disappeared from Christian history.
Our missionaries carry the Bible to India, but can it be said they explain it practically, as Jesus did, when hundreds are dying annually of the bite of serpents?
The decision, by vote of Councils, as to what should be considered Holy Writ; the manifest mistakes in the Septuagint; the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament, and the three hundred thousand in the New, — these facts show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record, with its own hue darkening to some extent the inspired pages. But mistakes could not wholly obscure the Science of the Scriptures, seen from Genesis to Revelation, or mar the demonstration of Jesus, and annul the healing of the prophets, who doubtless foresaw that “the stone which the builders rejected would become the head of the corner.”
