Page:The People's Idea of God.djvu/12

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10
SERMON

harmony and immortality. Thought is the essence of an act, and the stronger element of action; even as steam is more powerful than water, simply because it is more ethereal. Essences are refinements that lose some materiality; and as we struggle through the cold night of physics, matter will become vague, and melt into nothing under the microscope of Mind.

Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her humane foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law regulating the practice of medicine in 1880. It were well if the sister States had followed her example and sustained as nobly our constitutional Bill of Rights. Discerning the God-given rights of man, Paul said, “I was free born.” Justice and truth make man free, injustice and error enslave him. Mental Science alone grasps the standard of liberty, and battles for man's whole rights, divine as well as human. It assures us, of a verity, that mortal beliefs, and not a law of nature, have made men sinning and sick, — that they alone have fettered free limbs, and marred in mind the model of man.

We possess our own body, and make it harmonious or discordant according to the images that thought reflects upon it. The emancipation of our bodies from sickness will follow the mind's freedom from sin; and, as St. Paul admonishes, we should be “waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” The rights of man were vindicated but in a single instance when African slavery was abolished on this continent, yet that hour was a