Words from 'Unity Of Good'-MARY Baker Eddy

[Baby Face Nelson]

Nevertheless, at the present crude hour, no wise men or women will rudely
or prematurely agitate a theme involving the All of infinity.

Rather will they rejoice in the small understanding they have already
gained of the wholeness of Deity, and work gradually and gently up toward
the perfect thought divine. This meekness will increase their apprehension
of God, because their mental struggles and pride of opinion will
proportionately diminish.

Every one should be encouraged not to accept any personal opinion on so
great a matter, but to seek the divine Science of this question of Truth by
following upward individual convictions, undisturbed by the frightened
sense of any need of attempting to solve every Life-problem in a day.

"Great is the mystery of godliness," says Paul; and _mystery_ involves the
unknown. No stubborn purpose to force conclusions on this subject will
unfold in us a higher sense of Deity; neither will it promote the Cause of
Truth or enlighten the individual thought.

Let us respect the rights of conscience and the liberty of the sons of God,
so letting our "moderation be known to all men." Let no enmity, no
untempered controversy, spring up between Christian Science students and
Christians who wholly or partially differ from them as to the nature of sin
and the marvellous unity of man with God shadowed forth in scientific
thought. Rather let the stately goings of this wonderful part of Truth be
left to the supernal guidance.

"These are but parts of Thy ways," says Job; and the whole is greater than
its parts. Our present understanding is but "the seed within itself," for
it is divine Science, "bearing fruit after its kind."

Sooner or later the whole human race will learn that, in proportion as the
spotless selfhood of God is understood, human nature will be renovated, and
man will receive a higher selfhood, derived from God, and the redemption of
mortals from sin, sickness, and death be established on everlasting
foundations.

The Science of physical harmony, as now presented to the people in divine
light, is radical enough to promote as forcible collisions of thought as
the age has strength to bear. Until the heavenly law of health, according
to Christian Science, is firmly grounded, even the thinkers are not
prepared to answer intelligently leading questions about God and sin, and
the world is far from ready to assimilate such a grand and all-absorbing
verity concerning the divine nature and character as is embraced in the
theory of God's blindness to error and ignorance of sin. No wise mother,
though a graduate of Wellesley College, will talk to her babe about the
problems of Euclid.

Not much more than a half-century ago the assertion of universal salvation
provoked discussion and horror, similar to what our declarations about sin
and Deity must arouse, if hastily pushed to the front while the platoons of
Christian Science are not yet thoroughly drilled in the plainer manual of
their spiritual armament. "Wait patiently on the Lord;" and in less than
another fifty years His name will be magnified in the apprehension of this
new subject, as already He is glorified in the wide extension of belief in
the impartial grace of God,--shown by the changes at Andover Seminary and
in multitudes of other religious folds.

from page 10:
Jesus distinctly taught the arrogant Pharisees that, from the beginning,
their father, the devil, was the would-be murderer of Truth. A right
apprehension of the wonderful utterances of him who "spake as never man
spake," would despoil error of its borrowed plumes, and transform the
universe into a home of marvellous light,--"a consummation devoutly to be
wished."

Error says God must know evil because He knows all things; but Holy Writ
declares God told our first parents that in the day when they should
partake of the fruit of evil, they must surely die. Would it not absurdly
follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil necessarily leads
to extinction? Rather let us think of God as saying, I am infinite good;
therefore I know not evil. Dwelling in light, I can see only the brightness
of My own glory.

Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and sees it
not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy everything
that is unlike Myself.

Many fancy that our heavenly Father reasons thus: If pain and sorrow were
not in My mind, I could not remedy them, and wipe the tears from the eyes
of My children. Error says you must know grief in order to console it.
Truth, God, says you oftenest console others in troubles that you have not.
Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?

God says, I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My
sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone
enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.

Error says God must know death in order to strike at its root; but God
saith, I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever
conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. I am All. A knowledge
of aught beside Myself is impossible.

If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.

With God, _knowledge_ is necessarily _foreknowledge_; and _foreknowledge_
and _foreordination_ must be one, in an infinite Being. What Deity
_foreknows_, Deity must _foreordain_; else He is not omnipotent, and, like
ourselves, He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet
which He cannot avert.

If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He
foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it
aforetime,--foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?

But this we cannot believe of God; for if the supreme good could predestine
or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of
infinite moral unity. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness,
how great is that darkness!" On the contrary, evil is only a delusive
deception, without any actuality which Truth can know.

[Baby Face Nelson]

pert of 11:
Rectifications


How is a mistake to be rectified? By reversal or revision,--by seeing it in
its proper light, and then turning it or turning from it.

We undo the statements of error by reversing them.

Through these three statements, or misstatements, evil comes into
authority:--

_First:_ The Lord created it.
_Second:_ The Lord knows it.
_Third:_ I am afraid of it.

By a reverse process of argument evil must be dethroned:--

_First:_ God never made evil.
_Second:_ He knows it not.
_Third:_ We therefore need not fear it.

Try this process, dear inquirer, and so reach that perfect Love which
"casteth out fear," and then see if this Love does not destroy in you all
hate and the sense of evil. You will awake to the perception of God as
All-in-all. You will find yourself losing the knowledge and the operation
of sin, proportionably as you realize the divine infinitude and believe
that He can see nothing outside of His own focal distance.

[Big Smokes]

who she

[Baby Face Nelson]

who she

founder of christian science

[Big Smokes]

does this come from a book or something?

[Baby Face Nelson]

yh its called Unity Of Good

[Baby Face Nelson]

Our Master said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Then God and heaven, or Life, are present, and death is not the real stepping-stone to Life and happiness. They are now and here; and a change in human consciousness, from sin to holiness, would reveal this wonder of being. Because God is ever present, no boundary of time can separate us from Him and the heaven of His presence; and because God is Life, all Life is eternal.

Is it unchristian to believe there is no death? Not unless it be a sin to believe that God is Life and All-in-all. Evil and disease do not testify of Life and God.

Human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal. The evil accompanying physical personality is illusive and mortal; but the good attendant upon spiritual individuality is immortal. Existing here and now, this unseen individuality is real and eternal. The so-called material senses, and the mortal mind which is misnamed man, take no cognizance of spiritual individuality, which manifests immortality, whose Principle is God.

To God alone belong the indisputable realities of being. Death is a contradiction of Life, or God; therefore it is not in accordance with His law, but antagonistic thereto.

Death, then, is error, opposed to Truth,—even the unreality of mortal mind, not the reality of that Mind which is Life. Error has no life, and is virtually without existence. Life is real; and all is real which proceeds from Life and is inseparable from it.

It is unchristian to believe in the transition called material death, since matter has no life, and such misbelief must enthrone another power, an imaginary life, above the living and true God. A material sense of life robs God, by declaring that not He alone is Life, but that something else also is life,—thus affirming the existence and rulership of more gods than one. This idolatrous and false sense of life is all that dies, or appears to die.

The opposite understanding of God brings to light Life and immortality. Death has no quality of Life; and no divine fiat commands us to believe in aught which is unlike God, or to deny that He is Life eternal.

Life as God, moral and spiritual good, is not seen in the mineral, vegetable, or animal kingdoms. Hence the inevitable conclusion that Life is not in these kingdoms, and that the popular views to this effect are not up to the Christian standard of Life, or equal to the reality of being, whose Principle is God.


When "the Word" is "made flesh" among mortals, the Truth of Life is rendered practical on the body. Eternal Life is partially understood; and sickness, sin, and death yield to holiness, health, and Life,—that is, to God. The lust of the flesh and the pride of physical life must be quenched in the divine essence,—that omnipotent Love which annihilates hate, that Life which knows no death.

"Who hath believed our report?" Who understands these sayings? He to whom the arm of the Lord is revealed. He loves them from whom divine Science removes human weakness by divine strength, and who unveil the Messiah, whose name is Wonderful.

Man has no underived power. That selfhood is false which opposes itself to God, claims another father, and denies spiritual sonship; but as many as receive the knowledge of God in Science must reflect, in some degree, the power of Him who gave and giveth man dominion over all the earth.

As soldiers of the cross we must be brave, and let Science declare the immortal status of man, and deny the evidence of the material senses, which testify that man dies.

As the image of God, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not death. The material senses testify falsely. They presuppose that God is good and that man is evil, that Deity is deathless, but that man dies, losing the divine likeness.

Science and material sense conflict at all points, from the revolution of the earth to the fall of a sparrow. It is mortality only that dies.

To say that you and I, as mortals, will not enter this dark shadow of material sense, called death, is to assert what we have not proved; but man in Science never dies. Material sense, or the belief of life in matter, must perish, in order to prove man deathless.

As Truth supersedes error, and bears the fruits of Love, this understanding of Truth subordinates the belief in death, and demonstrates Life as imperative in the divine order of being.

Jesus declares that they who believe his sayings will never die; therefore mortals can no more receive everlasting life by believing in death, than they can become perfect by believing in imperfection and living imperfectly.

Life is God, and God is good. Hence Life abides in man, if man abides in good, if he lives in God, who holds Life by a spiritual and not by a material sense of being.

A sense of death is not requisite to a proper or true sense of Life, but beclouds it. Death can never alarm or even appear to him who fully understands Life. The death-penalty comes through our ignorance of Life,—of that which is without beginning and without end,—and is the punishment of this ignorance.

Holding a material sense of Life, and lacking the spiritual sense of it, mortals die, in belief, and regard all things as temporal. A sense material apprehends nothing strictly belonging to the nature and office of Life. It conceives and beholds nothing but mortality, and has but a feeble concept of immortality.

In order to reach the true knowledge and consciousness of Life, we must learn it of good. Of evil we can never learn it, because sin shuts out the real sense of Life, and brings in an unreal sense of suffering and death.

Knowledge of evil, or belief in it, involves a loss of the true sense of good, God; and to know death, or to believe in it, involves a temporary loss of God, the infinite and only Life.

Resurrection from the dead (that is, from the belief in death) must come to all sooner or later; and they who have part in this resurrection are they upon whom the second death has no power.

The sweet and sacred sense of the permanence of man's unity with his Maker can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of good, opening wide the portal from death into Life; and when this Life shall appear "we shall be like Him," and we shall go to the Father, not through death, but through Life; not through error, but through Truth.

All Life is Spirit, and Spirit can never dwell in its antagonist, matter. Life, therefore, is deathless, because God cannot be the opposite of Himself. In Christian Science there is no matter; hence matter neither lives nor dies. To the senses, matter appears to both live and die, and these phenomena appear to go on ad infinitum; but such a theory implies perpetual disagreement with Spirit.


Life, God, being everywhere, it must follow that death can be nowhere; because there is no place left for it.

Soul, Spirit, is deathless. Matter, sin, and death are not the outcome of Spirit, holiness, and Life. What then are matter, sin, and death? They can be nothing except the results of material consciousness; but material consciousness can have no real existence, because it is not a living—that is to say, a divine and intelligent—reality.

That man must be vicious before he can be virtuous, dying before he can be deathless, material before he can be spiritual, is an error of the senses; for the very opposite of this error is the genuine Science of being.

Man, in Science, is as perfect and immortal now, as when "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

With Christ, Life was not merely a sense of existence, but a sense of might and ability to subdue material conditions. No wonder "people were astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."

As defined by Jesus, Life had no beginning; nor was it the result of organization, or of an infusion of power into matter. To him, Life was Spirit.

Truth, defiant of error or matter, is Science, dispelling a false sense and leading man into the true sense of selfhood and Godhood; wherein the mortal does not develop the immortal, nor the material the spiritual, but wherein true manhood and womanhood go forth in the radiance of eternal being and its perfections, unchanged and unchangeable.

This generation seems too material for any strong demonstration over death, and hence cannot bring out the infinite reality of Life,—namely, that there is no death, but only Life. The present mortal sense of being is too finite for anchorage in infinite good, God, because mortals now believe in the possibility that Life can be evil.

The achievement of this ultimatum of Science, complete triumph over death, requires time and immense spiritual growth.

I have by no means spoken of myself, I cannot speak of myself as "sufficient for these things." I insist only upon the fact, as it exists in divine Science, that man dies not, and on the words of the Master in support of this verity,—words which can never "pass away till all be fulfilled."

Because of these profound reasons I urge Christians to have more faith in living than in dying. I exhort them to accept Christ's promise, and unite the influence of their own thoughts with the power of his teachings, in the Science of being. This will interpret the divine power to human capacity, and enable us to apprehend, or lay hold upon, "that for which," as Paul says in the third chapter of Philippians, we are also "apprehended of [or grasped by] Christ Jesus,"—the ever-present Life which knows no death, the omnipresent Spirit which knows no matter.


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[Baby Face Nelson]

The chaos of mortal mind is made the stepping-stone to the cosmos of immortal Mind.

If Jesus suffered, as the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter, and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God. Not his own sins, but the sins of the world, "crucified the Lord of glory," and "put him to an open shame."

Holding a quickened sense of false environment, and suffering from mentality in opposition to Truth, are significant of that state of mind which the actual understanding of Christian Science first eliminates and then destroys.

In the divine order of Science every follower of Christ shares his cup of sorrows. He also suffereth in the flesh, and from the mentality which opposes the law of Spirit; but the divine law is supreme, for it freeth him from the law of sin and death.

Prophets and apostles suffered from the thoughts of others. Their conscious being was not fully exempt from physicality and the sense of sin.

Until he awakes from his delusion, he suffers least from sin who is a hardened sinner. The hypocrite's affections must first be made to fret in their chains; and the pangs of hell must lay hold of him ere he can change from flesh to Spirit, become acquainted with that Love which is without dissimulation and endureth all things. Such mental conditions as ingratitude, lust, malice, hate, constitute the miasma of earth. More obnoxious than Chinese stenchpots are these dispositions which offend the spiritual sense.

Anatomically considered, the design of the material senses is to warn mortals of the approach of danger by the pain they feel and occasion; but as this sense disappears it foresees the impending doom and foretells the pain. Man's refuge is in spirituality, "under the shadow of the Almighty."

The cross is the central emblem of human history. Without it there is neither temptation nor glory. When Jesus turned and said, "Who hath touched me?" he must have felt the influence of the woman's thought; for it is written that he felt that "virtue had gone out of him." His pure consciousness was discriminating, and rendered this infallible verdict; but he neither held her error by affinity nor by infirmity, for it was detected and dismissed.

This gospel of suffering brought life and bliss. This is earth's Bethel in stone,—its pillow, supporting the ladder which reaches heaven.

Suffering was the confirmation of Paul's faith. Through "a thorn in the flesh" he learned that spiritual grace was sufficient for him.

Peter rejoiced that he was found worthy to suffer for Christ; because to suffer with him is to reign with him.

Sorrow is the harbinger of joy. Mortal throes of anguish forward the birth of immortal being; but divine Science wipes away all tears.