Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/507

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Recapitulation
491

is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. Animal magnetism thus uncovers material sense, and shows it to be a belief without actual foundation or validity. Change the belief, and the sensation changes. Destroy the belief, and the sensation disappears.

Material man is made up of involuntary and voluntary error, of a negative right and a positive wrong, the latter Man linked with Spirit calling itself right. Man's spiritual individuality is never wrong. It is the likeness of man's Maker. Matter cannot connect mortals with the true origin and facts of being, in which all must end. It is only by acknowledging the supremacy of Spirit, which annuls the claims of matter, that mortals can lay off mortality and find the indissoluble spiritual link which establishes man forever in the divine likeness, inseparable from his creator.

The belief that matter and mind are one, — that matter is awake at one time and asleep at another, Material man as a dream sometimes presenting no appearance of mind, — this belief culminates in another belief, that man dies. Science reveals material man as never the real being. The dream or belief goes on, whether our eyes are closed or open. In sleep, memory and consciousness are lost from the body, and they wander whither they will apparently with their own separate embodiment. Personality is not the individuality of man. A wicked man may have an attractive personality.

When we are awake, we dream of the pains and pleasures Spiritual existence the one fact of matter. Who will say, even though he does not understand Christian Science, that this dream — rather than the dreamer — may not be mortal man? Who can rationally say otherwise,