Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/362

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346
Science and Health

by one critic. I regret that such criticism confounds man with Adam. When man is spoken of as made in God's God's idea the ideal man image, it is not sinful and sickly mortal man who is referred to, but the ideal man, reflecting God's likeness.

It is sometimes said that Christian Science teaches the nothingness of sin, sickness, and death, and then teaches Nothingness of error how this nothingness is to be saved and healed. The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness — yea, the allness — of Truth. It is self-evident that we are harmonious only as we cease to manifest evil or the belief that we suffer from the sins of others. Disbelief in error destroys error, and leads to the discernment of Truth. There are no vacuums. How then can this demonstration be “fraught with falsities painful to behold”?

We treat error through the understanding of Truth, because Truth is error's antidote. If a dream ceases, it Truth antidotes error is self-destroyed, and the terror is over. When a sufferer is convinced that there is no reality in his belief of pain, — because matter has no sensation, hence pain in matter is a false belief, — how can he suffer longer? Do you feel the pain of tooth-pulling, when you believe that nitrous-oxide gas has made you unconscious? Yet, in your concept, the tooth, the operation, and the forceps are unchanged.

Material beliefs must be expelled to make room for Serving two masters spiritual understanding. We cannot serve both God and mammon at the same time; but is not this what frail mortals are trying to do? Paul says: