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Title: The People's Idea of God: Its Effect On Health And Christianity

Author: Mary Baker Eddy

Release date: January 26, 2011 [eBook #35081]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Gerard Arthus and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


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  THE

  PEOPLE'S IDEA OF GOD

  ITS EFFECT ON

  HEALTH AND CHRISTIANITY

  BY

  MARY BAKER EDDY

  AUTHOR OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES

  A SERMON DELIVERED AT BOSTON

  Published by
  The Christian Science Publishing Society
  FOR THE TRUSTEES UNDER THE WILL OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
  BOSTON, U.S.A.




  Authorized Literature of
  THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST
  in Boston, Massachusetts


  _Copyright, 1886, 1908_
  BY MARY BAKER G. EDDY

  _Copyright renewed, 1914_

  _All rights reserved_




SERMON

SUBJECT

THE PEOPLE'S IDEA OF GOD

TEXT: _One Lord, one faith, one baptism._--EPHESIANS iv. 5.


Every step of progress is a step more spiritual. The great element of
reform is not born of human wisdom; it draws not its life from human
organizations; rather is it the crumbling away of material elements
from reason, the translation of law back to its original
language,--Mind, and the final unity between man and God. The
footsteps of thought, as they pass from the sensual side of existence
to the reality and Soul of all things, are slow, portending a long
night to the traveller; but the guardians of the gloom are the angels
of His presence, that impart grandeur to the intellectual wrestling
and collisions with old-time faiths, as we drift into more spiritual
latitudes. The beatings of our heart can be heard; but the ceaseless
throbbings and throes of thought are unheard, as it changes from
material to spiritual standpoints. Even the pangs of death disappear,
accordingly as the understanding that we are spiritual beings here
reappears, and we learn our capabilities for good, which insures
man's continuance and is the true glory of immortality.

The improved theory and practice of religion and of medicine are
mainly due to the people's improved views of the Supreme Being. As the
finite sense of Deity, based on material conceptions of spiritual
being, yields its grosser elements, we shall learn what God is, and
what God does. The Hebrew term that gives another letter to the word
_God_ and makes it _good_, unites Science and Christianity, whereby we
learn that God, good, is universal, and the divine Principle,--Life,
Truth, Love; and this Principle is learned through goodness, and of
Mind instead of matter, of Soul instead of the senses, and by
revelation supporting reason. It is the false conceptions of Spirit,
based on the evidences gained from the material senses, that make a
Christian only in theory, shockingly material in practice, and form
its Deity out of the worst human qualities, else of wood or stone.

Such a theory has overturned empires in demoniacal contests over
religion. Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age,
has been dematerialized and unfinited has their Deity become good; no
longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life,
Truth, and Love,--Life without beginning or ending, Truth without a
lapse or error, and Love universal, infinite, eternal. This more
perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a
benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations as well
as individuals, and will lift man ultimately to the understanding
that our ideals form our characters, that as a man "thinketh in his
heart, so is he." The crudest ideals of speculative theology have made
monsters of men; and the ideals of _materia medica_ have made helpless
invalids and cripples. The eternal roasting amidst noxious vapors; the
election of the minority to be saved and the majority to be eternally
punished; the wrath of God, to be appeased by the sacrifice and
torture of His favorite Son,--are some of the false beliefs that have
produced sin, sickness, and death; and then would affirm that these
are natural, and that Christianity and Christ-healing are
preternatural; yea, that make a mysterious God and a natural devil.

Let us rejoice that the bow of omnipotence already spans the moral
heavens with light, and that the more spiritual idea of good and Truth
meets the old material thought like a promise upon the cloud, while it
inscribes on the thoughts of men at this period a more metaphysical
religion founded upon Christian Science. A personal God is based on
finite premises, where thought begins wrongly to apprehend the
infinite, even the quality or the quantity of eternal good. This
limited sense of God as good limits human thought and action in their
goodness, and assigns them mortal fetters in the outset. It has
implanted in our religions certain unspiritual shifts, such as
dependence on personal pardon for salvation, rather than obedience to
our Father's demands, whereby we grow out of sin in the way that our
Lord has appointed; namely, by working out our own salvation. It has
given to all systems of _materia medica_ nothing but materialism,--more
faith in hygiene and drugs than in God. Idolatry sprang from the belief
that God is a form, more than an infinite and divine Mind; sin,
sickness, and death originated in the belief that Spirit materialized
into a body, infinity became finity, or man, and the eternal entered
the temporal. Mythology, or the myth of ologies, said that Life, which
is infinite and eternal, could enter finite man through his nostrils,
and matter become intelligent of good and evil, because a serpent said
it. When first good, God, was named a person, and evil another person,
the error that a personal God and a personal devil entered into
partnership and would form a third person, called material man,
obtained expression. But these unspiritual and mysterious ideas of God
and man are far from correct.

The glorious Godhead is Life, Truth, and Love, and these three terms
for one divine Principle are the three in one that can be understood,
and that find no reflection in sinning, sick, and dying mortals. No
miracle of grace can make a spiritual mind out of beliefs that are as
material as the heathen deities. The pagan priests appointed Apollo
and Esculapius the gods of medicine, and they inquired of these
heathen deities what drugs to prescribe. Systems of religion and of
medicine grown out of such false ideals of the Supreme Being cannot
heal the sick and cast out devils, error. Eschewing a materialistic
and idolatrous theory and practice of medicine and religion, the
apostle devoutly recommends the more spiritual Christianity,--"one
Lord, one faith, one baptism." The prophets and apostles, whose lives
are the embodiment of a living faith, have not taken away our Lord,
that we know not where they have laid him; they have resurrected a
deathless life of love; and into the cold materialisms of dogma and
doctrine we look in vain for their more spiritual ideal, the risen
Christ, whose _materia medica_ and theology were one.

The ideals of primitive Christianity are nigh, even at our door. Truth
is not lost in the mists of remoteness or the barbarisms of spiritless
codes. The right ideal is not buried, but has risen higher to our
mortal sense, and having overcome death and the grave, wrapped in a
pure winding-sheet, it sitteth beside the sepulchre in angel form,
saying unto us, "Life is God; and our ideal of God has risen above the
sod to declare His omnipotence." This white-robed thought points away
from matter and doctrine, or dogma, to the diviner sense of Life and
Love,--yea, to the Principle that is God, and to the demonstration
thereof in healing the sick. Let us then heed this heavenly visitant,
and not entertain the angel unawares.

The ego is not self-existent matter animated by mind, but in itself is
mind; therefore a Truth-filled mind makes a pure Christianity and a
healthy mind and body. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in a lecture before
the Harvard Medical School: "I firmly believe that if the whole
_materia medica_ could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be
all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." Dr.
Benjamin Waterhouse writes: "I am sick of learned quackery." Dr.
Abercrombie, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh,
writes: "Medicine is the science of guessing." Dr. James Johnson,
Surgeon Extraordinary to the King, says: "I declare my conscientious
belief, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there was
not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist,
druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less
sickness and less mortality than now obtains." Voltaire says: "The art
of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the
disease."

Believing that man is the victim of his Maker, we naturally fear God
more than we love Him; whereas "perfect Love casteth out fear;" but
when we learn God aright, we love Him, because He is found altogether
lovely. Thus it is that a more spiritual and true ideal of Deity
improves the race physically and spiritually. God is no longer a
mystery to the Christian Scientist, but a divine Principle, understood
in part, because the grand realities of Life and Truth are found
destroying sin, sickness, and death; and it should no longer be deemed
treason to understand God, when the Scriptures enjoin us to "acquaint
now thyself with Him [God], and be at peace;" we should understand
something of that great good for which we are to leave all else.

Periods and peoples are characterized by their highest or their
lowest ideals, by their God and their devil. We are all sculptors,
working out our own ideals, and leaving the impress of mind on the
body as well as on history and marble, chiselling to higher
excellence, or leaving to rot and ruin the mind's ideals. Recognizing
this as we ought, we shall turn often from marble to model, from
matter to Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives.

    "Chisel in hand stood a sculptor-boy,
      With his marble block before him;
    And his face lit up with a smile of joy
      As an angel dream passed o'er him.
    He carved the dream on that shapeless stone
      With many a sharp incision.
    With heaven's own light the sculptor shone,--
      He had caught the angel-vision.

    "Sculptors of life are we as we stand
      With our lives uncarved before us,
    Waiting the hour when at God's command
      Our life dream passes o'er us.
    If we carve it then on the yielding stone
      With many a sharp incision,
    Its heavenly beauty shall be our own,--
      Our lives that angel-vision."

To remove those objects of sense called sickness and disease, we must
appeal to mind to improve its subjects and objects of thought, and
give to the body those better delineations. Scientific discovery and
the inspiration of Truth have taught me that the health and character
of man become more or less perfect as his mind-models are more or less
spiritual. Because God is Spirit, our thoughts must spiritualize to
approach Him, and our methods grow more spiritual to accord with our
thoughts. Religion and medicine must be dematerialized to present the
right idea of Truth; then will this idea cast out error and heal the
sick. If changeableness that repenteth itself; partiality that elects
some to be saved and others to be lost, or that answers the prayer of
one and not of another; if incompetency that cannot heal the sick, or
lack of love that will not; if unmercifulness, that for the sins of a
few tired years punishes man eternally,--are our conceptions of Deity,
we shall bring out these qualities of character in our own lives and
extend their influence to others.

Judaism, enjoining the limited and definite form of a national
religion, was not more the antithesis of Christianity than are our
finite and material conceptions of Deity. Life is God; but we say that
Life is carried on through principal processes, and speculate
concerning material forces. Mind is supreme; and yet we make more of
matter, and lean upon it for health and life. Mind, that governs the
universe, governs every action of the body as directly as it moves a
planet and controls the muscles of the arm. God grant that the
trembling chords of human hope shall again be swept by the divine
_Talitha cumi_, "Damsel, I say unto thee, arise." Then shall Christian
Science again appear, to light our sepulchres with immortality. We
thank our Father that to-day the uncremated fossils of material
systems, already charred, are fast fading into ashes; and that man
will ere long stop trusting where there is no trust, and gorging his
faith with skill proved a million times unskilful.

Christian Science has one faith, one Lord, one baptism; and this faith
builds on Spirit, not matter; and this baptism is the purification of
mind,--not an ablution of the body, but tears of repentance, an
overflowing love, washing away the motives for sin; yea, it is love
leaving self for God. The cool bath may refresh the body, or as
compliance with a religious rite may declare one's belief; but it
cannot purify his mind, or meet the demands of Love. It is the baptism
of Spirit that washes our robes and makes them white in the blood of
the Lamb; that bathes us in the life of Truth and the truth of Life.
Having one Lord, we shall not be idolaters, dividing our homage and
obedience between matter and Spirit; but shall work out our own
salvation, after the model of our Father, who never pardons the sin
that deserves to be punished and can be destroyed only through
suffering.

We ask and receive not, because we "ask amiss;" even dare to invoke
the divine aid of Spirit to heal the sick, and then administer drugs
with full confidence in their efficacy, showing our greater faith in
matter, despite the authority of Jesus that "ye cannot serve two
masters."

Silent prayer is a desire, fervent, importunate: here metaphysics is
seen to rise above physics, and rest all faith in Spirit, and remove
all evidence of any other power than Mind; whereby we learn the great
fact that there is no omnipotence, unless omnipotence is the
_All_-power. This truth of Deity, understood, destroys discord with
the higher and more potent evidences in Christian Science of man's
harmony and immortality. Thought is the essence of an act, and the
stronger element of action; even as steam is more powerful than water,
simply because it is more ethereal. Essences are refinements that lose
some materiality; and as we struggle through the cold night of
physics, matter will become vague, and melt into nothing under the
microscope of Mind.

Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her humane
foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law regulating the practice of
medicine in 1880. It were well if the sister States had followed her
example and sustained as nobly our constitutional Bill of Rights.
Discerning the God-given rights of man, Paul said, "I was free born."
Justice and truth make man free, injustice and error enslave him.
Mental Science alone grasps the standard of liberty, and battles for
man's whole rights, divine as well as human. It assures us, of a
verity, that mortal beliefs, and not a law of nature, have made men
sinning and sick,--that they alone have fettered free limbs, and
marred in mind the model of man.

We possess our own body, and make it harmonious or discordant
according to the images that thought reflects upon it. The
emancipation of our bodies from sickness will follow the mind's
freedom from sin; and, as St. Paul admonishes, we should be "waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." The rights of
man were vindicated but in a single instance when African slavery was
abolished on this continent, yet that hour was a prophecy of the full
liberty of the sons of God as found in Christian Science. The
defenders of the rights of the colored man were scarcely done with
their battles before a new abolitionist struck the keynote of higher
claims, in which it was found that the feeblest mind, enlightened and
spiritualized, can free its body from disease as well as sin; and this
victory is achieved, not with bayonet and blood, not by inhuman
warfare, but in divine peace.

Above the platform of human rights let us build another staging for
diviner claims,--even the supremacy of Soul over sense, wherein man
cooperates with and is made subject to his Maker. The lame, the blind,
the sick, the sensual, are slaves, and their fetters are gnawing away
life and hope; their chains are clasped by the false teachings, false
theories, false fears, that enforce new forms of oppression, and are
the modern Pharaohs that hold the children of Israel still in bondage.
Mortals, _alias_ mortal minds, make the laws that govern their bodies,
as directly as men pass legislative acts and enact penal codes; while
the body, obedient to the legislation of mind, but ignorant of the law
of belief, calls its own enactments "laws of matter." The legislators
who are greatly responsible for all the woes of mankind are those
leaders of public thought who are mistaken in their methods of
humanity.

The learned quacks of this period "bind heavy burdens," that they
themselves will not touch "with one of their fingers." Scientific
guessing conspires unwittingly against the liberty and lives of men.
Should we but hearken to the higher law of God, we should think for
one moment of these divine statutes of God: Let them have "dominion
over all the earth." "And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not
hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
The only law of sickness or death is a law of mortal belief, and
infringement on the merciful and just government of God. When this
great fact is understood, the spurious, imaginary laws of matter--when
matter is not a lawgiver--will be disputed and trampled under the feet
of Truth. Deal, then, with this fabulous law as with an inhuman State
law; repeal it in mind, and acknowledge only God in all thy
ways,--"who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy
diseases." Few there be who know what a power mind is to heal when
imbued with the spiritual truth that lifts man above the demands of
matter.

As our ideas of Deity advance to truer conceptions, we shall take in
the remaining two thirds of God's plan of redemption,--namely, man's
salvation from sickness and death. Our blessed Master demonstrated
this great truth of healing the sick and raising the dead as God's
whole plan, and proved the application of its Principle to human
wants. Having faith in drugs and hygienic drills, we lose faith in
omnipotence, and give the healing power to matter instead of Spirit.
As if Deity would not if He could, or could not if He would, give
health to man; when our Father bestows heaven not more willingly than
health; for without health there could be no heaven.

The worshippers of wood and stone have a more material deity, hence a
lower order of humanity, than those who believe that God is a personal
Spirit. But the worshippers of a person have a lower order of
Christianity than he who understands that the Divine Being is more
than a person, and can demonstrate in part this great impersonal Life,
Truth, and Love, casting out error and healing the sick. This
all-important understanding is gained in Christian Science, revealing
the one God and His all-power and ever-presence, and the brotherhood
of man in unity of Mind and oneness of Principle.

On the startled ear of humanity rings out the iron tread of merciless
invaders, putting man to the rack for his conscience, or forcing from
the lips of manhood shameful confessions,--Galileo kneeling at the
feet of priestcraft, and giving the lie to science. But the lofty
faith of the pious Polycarp proved the triumph of mind over the body,
when they threatened to let loose the wild beasts upon him, and he
replied: "Let them come; I cannot change at once from good to bad."
Then they bound him to the stake, set fire to the fagots, and his pure
faith went up through the baptism of fire to a higher sense of Life.
The infidel was blind who said, "Christianity is fit only for women
and weak-minded men." But infidels disagree; for Bonaparte said:
"Since ever the history of Christianity was written, the loftiest
intellects have had a practical faith in God;" and Daniel Webster
said: "My heart has assured and reassured me that Christianity must be
a divine reality."

As our ideas of Deity become more spiritual, we express them by
objects more beautiful. To-day we clothe our thoughts of death with
flowers laid upon the bier, and in our cemeteries with amaranth
blossoms, evergreen leaves, fragrant recesses, cool grottos, smiling
fountains, and white monuments. The dismal gray stones of church-yards
have crumbled into decay, as our ideas of Life have grown more
spiritual; and in place of "bat and owl on the bending stones, are
wreaths of immortelles, and white fingers pointing upward." Thus it is
that our ideas of divinity form our models of humanity. O Christian
Scientist, thou of the church of the new-born; awake to a higher and
holier love for God and man; put on the whole armor of Truth; rejoice
in hope; be patient in tribulation,--that ye may go to the bed of
anguish, and look upon this dream of life in matter, girt with a
higher sense of omnipotence; and behold once again the power of divine
Life and Love to heal and reinstate man in God's own image and
likeness, having "one Lord, one faith, one baptism."




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