Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/331

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GOD AND MAN
327

world to prove my answer. It is the key that unlocks the innermost secrets of the heart in the prison of man's belief, and it leads the prisoner who has been bound a captive to health. Opinions are like a shadow, the substance is God. True wisdom is attached to the substance; false wisdom to the shadow. Language is attached to the shadow, which is attached to the substance; language is not in harmony with wisdom; and the discord lies in opinion. If the senses are attached to opinion, when the opinion is lost man loses his opinion but not his senses or life, for his life is his wisdom or self-existence. . . .

This something is a knowledge of this wisdom which puts man in possession of a truth that he can explain to another. It does not come to the man of opinions. This shows that every man has two selves, one acknowledged by the natural man, the other by the spiritual man. Here is the proof. The sick will admit that I can tell them how they feel better than they themselves can do. This shows that I know more than they do and also that this wisdom by which I tell these things is not known by the natural man.

To give the proof I must make the reader detach his senses from a God of man's belief and attach them to this invisible Wisdom which fills all space, and whose attributes are all light, all wisdom, all goodness and love, which is free from all selfishness and hypocrisy, which makes or breaks no laws, but lets man work out his own salvation; which has no laws, and restrictions and sanctions men's acts according to their belief, and holds them responsible for their belief, right or wrong, without respect to persons. For the natural man is only a shadow of man's wisdom, and if the shadow is from this world of opinions it will be destroyed when the light of the Wisdom comes. But the life will be saved, and when the senses shall be attached to this Wisdom, then shall be brought to pass that saying, “Oh! death! where is thy sting! Oh, grave! where is thy victory!” Death is robbed of its victim, the grave gives up its idea of death. Then life rises to that happy state where death, hell, and disease and the torments of existence find no place, from whence no traveler ever returns but where man knows himself. This wisdom teaches him that when our senses are attached to opinions of any kind we become the subject of that opinion and suffer according to the penalty attached to it, unless forgiven or the debt paid by the truth.