Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/242

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SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

should. You have begun at the numeration-table of Christian Science, and nothing but wrong intention can hinder your advancement. Working and praying, with true motives on your part, your Father will open the way. “Who did hinder you, that you should not obey the Truth?”

Saul of Tarsus only beheld the way — the Christ, or St. Paul's conversion. Truth — when his uncertain sense of right yielded to a spiritual sense, which is always right. Then the man was changed. Thought assumed a nobler outlook, and his life became more spiritual. Then Paul learned the wrong he had done in persecuting Christians, whose religion he had not understood. He beheld for the first time the true idea of Love, and learned a lesson in Divine Science.

Reform comes by understanding that there is no abiding pleasure in evil; and also by gaining an affection Reform. for goodness according to Science, which reveals the immortal fact that neither pleasure nor pain, appetite nor passion, exist in or of matter, while divine Mind can and does destroy the false sense of pleasure and of fear, and all the appetites of the human mind.

What a pitiful sight is malice, finding pleasure in revenge! Evil is sometimes a man's highest conception Image of the beast. of right, until his grasp on goodness grows stronger. Then he loses pleasure in wickedness, and it becomes his torment. The way to escape the misery of sin is to cease sinning. There is no other way. Sin is the image of the beast, to be effaced by the sweat of agony. It is a moral madness, which rushes forth to clamor with midnight and tempest.