Page:Christian Science versus Pantheism.djvu/74

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MESSAGES TO THE MOTHER CHURCH

experience. Matter apart from conscious mind is an impossible and unreal concept. He denies the existence of matter, and argues that matter is not without the mind, but within it, and that that which is generally called matter is only an impression produced by divine power on the mind by means of invariable rules styled the laws of nature.” Here he makes God the cause of all the ills of mortals and the casualties of earth.

Again, while descanting on the virtues of tar-water, he writes: “I esteem my having taken this medicine the greatest of all temporal blessings, and am convinced that under Providence I owe my life to it.” Making matter more potent than Mind, when the storms of disease beat against Bishop Berkeley's metaphysics and personality he fell, and great was the fall — from divine metaphysics to tar-water!

Christian Science is more than two hundred years old. It dates beyond Socrates, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Darwin, or Huxley. It is as old as God, although its earthly advent is called the Christian era.

I had not read one line of Berkeley's writings when I published my work Science and Health, the Christian Science textbook.

In contradistinction to his views I found it necessary to follow Jesus' teachings, and none other, in order to demonstrate the divine Science of Christianity — the metaphysics of Christ — healing all manner of diseases. Philosophy, materia medica, and scholastic theology were inadequate to prove the doctrine of Jesus, and I relinquished the form to attain the spirit or mystery of