Page:Science and Health.djvu/228

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SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

blessedness of the sons of God, is not communing with the body, but away from it with the impersonal Life, Truth, and Love. Regarding the body as the seat of Intelligence, Life, etc., is to hold one's self liable to be annihilated; and believing God a person, robs Omnipotence, clothing it with vestments of mortality. If Deity is personality, the forever “I am,” or God with us, is not Spirit, but matter, bounded by and narrowed into six feet of stature. If God is a person he dwells in a body, in which case matter and Spirit are God; this is impossible, for Spirit and matter are opposites. It is of little consequence what our educated views are on this subject; it is morally impossible for Principle to dwell in its idea; for Soul to inhabit a body; the unchanging to dwell in change, and the undying with death, or the Infinite with the finite, the perfect with the imperfect; yea, for Spirit and matter to unite, and Soul and personal sense to join hands. Soul cannot exist both within and without the body, else matter is gone, and all is found Principle and idea, in which case personality disappears. There is a wider difference between Spirit and matter than between light and darkness, that surely are not mingled into one. We know better than to say Deity is the shadow of matter, but if matter is Substance, God is shadow, and shadow never produced Substance; hence, matter must have created itself. The body of Spirit is spiritual and not material; but Principle, or Soul, cannot be compressed into one of its ideas, into what it has made. If God is in a body He is person, and not Principle, hence man is not his likeness or reflection. Again, the discord that comes from the belief of Soul in body, and