his world, its unkind
forces, its tempests, lightnings, earthquakes, poisons, rabid beasts, fatal
reptiles, and mortals.

Why are earth and mortals so elaborate in beauty, color, and form, if God
has no part in them? By the law of opposites. The most beautiful blossom is
often poisonous, and the most beautiful mansion is sometimes the home of
vice. The senses, not God, Soul, form the condition of beautiful evil, and
the supposed modes of self-conscious matter, which make a beautiful lie.
Now a lie takes its pattern from Truth, by reversing Truth. So evil and all
its forms are inverted good. God never made them; but the lie must say He
made them, or it would not be evil. Being a lie, it would be truthful to
call itself a lie; and by calling the knowledge of evil good, and greatly
to be desired, it constitutes the lie an evil.

The reality and individuality of man are good and God-made, and they are
here to be seen and demonstrated; it is only the evil belief that renders
them obscure.

Matter and evil are anti-Christian, the antipodes of Science. To say that
Mind is material, or that evil is Mind, is a misapprehension of being,--a
mistake which will die of its own delusion; for being self-contradictory,
it is also self-destructive. The harmony of man's being is not built on
such false foundations, which are no more logical, philosophical, or
scientific than would be the assertion that the rule of addition is the
rule of subtraction, and that sums done under both rules would have one
quotient.

Man's individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else he has lost his
true individuality as a perfect child of God. Man's Father is not a mortal
mind and a sinner; or else the immortal and unerring Mind, God, is not his
Father; but God _is_ man's origin and loving Father, hence that saying of
Jesus, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father,
which is in heaven."

The bright gold of Truth is dimmed by the doctrine of mind in matter.

To say there _is_ a false claim, called _sickness_, is to admit all there
is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim. To be healed, one must
lose sight of a false claim. If the claim be present to the thought, then
disease becomes as tangible as any reality. To regard sickness as a false
claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called
fact of the _claim_. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every
claim of error.

As with