Page:Miscellaneous Writings.djvu/212

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186
MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

he was not at this point giving the history of the spiritual man who originates in God, Love, who created man in His own image and likeness. In the creation of Adam from dust, — in which Soul is supposed to enter the embryo-man after his birth, — we see the material self-constituted belief of the Jews as referred to by St. Paul. Their material belief has fallen far below man's original standard, the spiritual man made in the image and likeness of God; for this erring belief even separates its conception of man from God, and ultimates in the opposite of immortal man, namely, in a sick and sinning mortal.

We learn in the Scriptures, as in divine Science, that God made all; that He is the universal Father and Mother of man; that God is divine Love: therefore divine Love is the divine Principle of the divine idea named man; in other words, the spiritual Principle of spiritual man. Now let us not lose this Science of man, but gain it clearly; then we shall see that man cannot be separated from his perfect Principle, God, inasmuch as an idea cannot be torn apart from its fundamental basis. This scientific knowledge affords self-evident proof of immortality; proof, also, that the Principle of man cannot produce a less perfect man than it produced in the beginning. A material sense of existence is not the scientific fact of being; whereas, the spiritual sense of God and His universe is the immortal and true sense of being.

As the apostle proceeds in this line of thought, he undoubtedly refers to the last Adam represented by the Messias, whose demonstration of God restored to mortals the lost sense of man's perfection, even the sense of the real man in God's likeness, who restored this sense by