hematics. The visible does not constitute the invisible, but may
carry its messages as we learn to read its poetic and mystic pages. The
visible speaks to the mortal nature, but the invisible beyond and above,
speaks to the immortal nature.

"Since we find matter to be so totally opposite the real, there is no
other name for it than as the unreal, and the unreal being a counterfeit
of the real, must be a lie, as the nature of a lie is to make false
claims, pretending they are true.

"Matter is a counterfeit because it is not genuine or of God, because it
is changeable and fleeting, because being limited to a visible form, it
must have finite limitations and can merely give finite conceptions.

"Taking it as a _sign_ of something infinite, we learn of the infinite.
All the students, teachers, learned men and women of the world have
added to the world's spiritual ideas revealed by their study of the
finite as well as their intuitive knowledge of the infinite. Charles
Kingsley gives us a hint of how to learn: 'Do not study matter for its
own sake but as the countenance of God. Try to extract every line of
beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible
feeling from it.'

"Our ideas of matter must then be entirely changed, and we must learn to
look beyond the seeming, to the true. We have believed in the reality
of matter and material environment because of reasoning from the false
basis that man is material or that he is a mixture of material and
spiritual. To believe that the flesh and blood of our sister or brother
is their real self, is to believe God capable of creating something
utterly unlike himself (John iii, James i.) which may suffer, sin and
die, and if He is all perfection, He can not know imperfection. If He is
all spirit, He can not know or be matter. Keep before your mind the
perfection, omnipotence, omnipresence of Spirit, God or Principle, and
you will see more and more clearly the inconsistency of anything
opposite Him emanating from Him.

"Believing in matter as a reality, we have endowed it with all the power
of the real, have ascribed to it life, substance and intelligence, when
it possesses neither.

"Where is the life when the body dies? If life were inherent in the
physical body, could it ever cease to be? God the eternal life principle
can not cease to be. The life manifested through the body is the life
which is God and can not be affected by the decay or disappearance