No and Yes | Page 7

material man and the physical senses receive
no spiritual idea, and feel no sensation of divine Love, spiritual man
and his spiritual senses are drinking in the nature and essence of the
individual infinite. A sinful sense is incompetent to understand the
realities of being,--that Life is God, and that man is in His image and
likeness. A sinner can take no cognizance of the noumenon or the
phenomena of Spirit; but leaving sin, sense rises to the fulness of the
stature of man in Christ.
Person is formed after the manner of mortal man, so far as he can
conceive of personality. Limitless personality is inconceivable. His
person and perfection are neither self-created, nor discerned through
imperfection; and of God as a person, human reason, imagination, and
revelation give us no knowledge. Error would fashion Deity in a
manlike mould, while Truth is moulding a Godlike man.
When the term divine Principle is used to signify Deity it may seem
distant or cold, until better apprehended. This Principle is Mind,
substance, Life, Truth, Love. When understood, Principle is found to be
the only term that fully conveys the ideas of God,--one Mind, a perfect
man, and divine Science. As the divine Principle is comprehended,
God's omnipotence and omnipresence will dawn on mortals, and the
notion of an everywhere-present body--or of an infinite Mind starting
from a finite body, and returning to it--will disappear.
Ever-present Love must seem ever absent to ever-present selfishness or

material sense. Hence this asking amiss and receiving not, and the
common idolatry of man-worship. In divine Science, God is recognized
as the only power, presence, and glory.
Adam's mistiness and Satan's reasoning, ever since the flood,--when
specimens of every kind emerged from the ark,--have run through the
veins of all human philosophy. Human reason is a blind guide, a
continued series of mortal hypotheses, antagonistic to Revelation and
Science. It is continually straying into forbidden by-paths of sensualism,
contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus and Paul, and the vision of
the Apocalypse. Human philosophy has ninety-nine parts of error to the
one-hundredth part of Truth,--an unsafe decoction for the race. The
Science that Jesus demonstrated, whose views of Truth Confucius and
Plato but dimly discerned, Science and Health interprets. It was not a
search after wisdom; it was wisdom, and it grasped in spiritual law the
universe,--all time, space, immortality, thought, extension. This
Science demonstrated the Principle of all phenomena, identity,
individuality, law; and showed man as reflecting God and the divine
capacity. Human philosophy would dethrone perfection, and substitute
matter and evil for divine means and ends.
Human philosophy has an undeveloped God, who unfolds Himself
through material modes, wherein the human and divine mingle in the
same realm and consciousness. This is rank infidelity; because by it we
lose God's ways and perpetuate the supposed power and reality of evil
ad infinitum. Christian Science rends this veil in the pantheon of many
gods, and reproduces the teachings of Jesus, whose philosophy is
incontestable, bears the strain of time, and brings in the glories of
eternity; "for other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is
Jesus Christ."
Divine philosophy is demonstrably the true idea of the Christ, wherein
Principle heals and saves. A philosophy which cannot heal the sick has
little resemblance to Science, and is, to say the least, like a cloud
without rain, "driven about by every wind of doctrine." Such
philosophy has certainly not touched the hem of the Christ garment.
Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop Berkeley, were

once clothed with a "brief authority;" but Berkeley ended his
metaphysical theory with a treatise on the healing properties of
tar-water, and Hegel was an inveterate snuff-taker. The circumlocution
and cold categories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals,
morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled metaphysical
systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Compared with the inspired
wisdom and infinite meaning of the Word of Truth, they are as
moonbeams to the sun, or as Stygian night to the kindling dawn.

IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL?
No man hath seen the person of good or of evil. Each is greater than the
corporeality we behold.
"He cast out devils." This record shows that the term devil is generic,
being used in the plural number. From this it follows that there is more
than one devil. That Jesus cast several persons out of another person, is
not stated, and is impossible. Hence the passage must refer to the evils
which were cast out.
Jesus defined devil as a mortal who is full of evil. "Have I not chosen
you twelve, and one of you _is a devil_?" His definition of evil
indicated his ability to cast it out. An incorrect concept of the nature of
evil