by literal things, but religious people follow the shadow or literal explanation and know nothing of the true meaning.
When God said “Let us create man in our own image,” it means Wisdom created man in the image of Truth. When He formed man or matter, that was the medium for this image to have and control, like all other living things that He made out of matter.
What is there that all will admit as existing independently of matter? Take the senses of man and see if there is any matter in them. All will admit that God is not matter. No one will say that sight is matter, for God sees all things, His sight penetrates the darkest places, and not a thing can be hidden from His sight. So it is with all the [spiritual] senses of man, and there is no matter in them. A knowledge of these senses condensed into an idea, spoken into existence called man and the senses attached to it—this is man in the image of his Maker.
Sympathy annihilates space. Discord makes it. Man is in one and Christ in the other. To be with Christ is to be in harmony with his wisdom, and this Wisdom will keep us from the evils of man's opinion. When our senses are attached to Truth we are heirs of Christ, and when attached to error we are heirs of this world. The Christ is to separate the error from the truth, for truth is harmony and error discord.
Man reasons in this was about the body: a child com- mences to grow, and man calls the growth of the child “life.” When the child has reached a certain maturity the body begins to decompose and die, like the tree; then the dust returns to the dust and the life of the body departs. No such ideas as these come from Wisdom, for Wisdom puts life in the spiritual senses: if we attach these to Wisdom, our life is in Wisdom, and as that never dies our life never dies.
Happiness is contentment, not life or death. Misery is discord, not Wisdom but error. If then you attach your life to an error, like distributing life to the body, then your life is unhappy according to the loss or disturbance.
If our happiness is from Wisdom it becomes a part of ourselves, but if it is from a belief it is adopted and we may lose it.
We often hear people say that their religion makes them happy. But if religion is anything outside of ourselves it
