Unity of Good | Page 8

His
mercy waneth never,-- God is wisdom, God is love.
Now if it be true that God's power never waneth, how can it be also true
that chance and change are universal factors,--that _man decays_?
Many ordinary Christians protest against this stanza of Bowring's, and
its sentiment is foreign to Christian Science. If God be changeless
goodness, as sings another line of this hymn, what place has chance in
the divine economy? Nay, there is in God naught fantastic. All is real,
all is serious. The phantasmagoria is a product of human dreams.

The Ego
From various friends comes inquiry as to the meaning of a word
employed in the foregoing colloquy.
There are two English words, often used as if they were synonyms,
which really have a shade of difference between them.
An egotist is one who talks much of himself. Egotism implies vanity
and self-conceit.
Egoism is a more philosophical word, signifying a passionate love of
self, which doubts all existence except its own. An egoist, therefore, is
one uncertain of everything except his own existence.

Applying these distinctions to evil and God, we shall find that evil is
egotistic,--boastful, but fleeing like a shadow at daybreak; while God is
egoistic, knowing only His own all-presence, all-knowledge, all-power.

Soul
We read in the Hebrew Scriptures, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die."
What is Soul? Is it a reality within the mortal body? Who can prove
that? Anatomy has not descried nor described Soul. It was never
touched by the scalpel nor cut with the dissecting-knife. The five
physical senses do not cognize it.
Who, then, dares define Soul as something within man? As well might
you declare some old castle to be peopled with demons or angels,
though never a light or form was discerned therein, and not a spectre
had ever been seen going in or coming out.
The common hypotheses about souls are even more vague than
ordinary material conjectures, and have less basis; because material
theories are built on the evidence of the material senses.
Soul must be God; since we learn Soul only as we learn God, by
spiritualization. As the five senses take no cognizance of Soul, so they
take no cognizance of God. Whatever cannot be taken in by mortal
mind--by human reflection, reason, or belief--must be the unfathomable
Mind, which "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." Soul stands in this
relation to every hypothesis as to its human character.
If Soul sins, it is a sinner, and Jewish law condemned the sinner to
death,--as does all criminal law, to a certain extent.
Spirit never sins, because Spirit is God. Hence, as Spirit, Soul is sinless,
and is God. Therefore there is, there can be, no spiritual death.
Transcending the evidence of the material senses, Science declares God
to be the Soul of all being, the only Mind and intelligence in the

universe. There is but one God, one Soul, or Mind, and that one is
infinite, supplying all that is absolutely immutable and eternal,--Truth,
Life, Love.
Science reveals Soul as that which the senses cannot define from any
standpoint of their own. What the physical senses miscall soul,
Christian Science defines as material sense; and herein lies the
discrepancy between the true Science of Soul and that material sense of
a soul which that very sense declares can never be seen or measured or
weighed or touched by physicality.
Often we can elucidate the deep meaning of the Scriptures by reading
sense instead of soul, as in the Forty-second Psalm: "Why art thou cast
down, O my soul [sense]?... Hope thou in God [Soul]: for I shall yet
praise Him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God [my
Soul, immortality]."
The Virgin-mother's sense being uplifted to behold Spirit as the sole
origin of man, she exclaimed, "My soul [spiritual sense] doth magnify
the Lord."
Human language constantly uses the word soul for sense. This it does
under the delusion that the senses can reverse the spiritual facts of
Science, whereas Science reverses the testimony of the material senses.
Soul is Life, and being spiritual Life, never sins. Material sense is the
so-called material life. Hence this lower sense sins and suffers,
according to material belief, till divine understanding takes away this
belief and restores Soul, or spiritual Life. "He restoreth my soul," says
David.
In his first epistle to the Corinthians (xv. 45) Paul writes: "The first
man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a
quickening spirit." The apostle refers to the second Adam as the
Messiah, our blessed Master, whose interpretation of God and His
creation--by restoring the spiritual sense of man as immortal instead of
mortal--made humanity victorious over death and the grave.

When I discovered the power of Spirit