and man. We must learn that God is infinitely
more than a person, or finite form, can contain; that [20]
God is a divine _Whole_, and _All_, an all-pervading in-
telligence and Love, a divine, infinite Principle; and
that Christianity is a divine Science. This newly
awakened consciousness is wholly spiritual; it emanates
from Soul instead of body, and is the new birth begun [25]
in Christian Science.

Now, dear reader, pause for a moment with me, earn-
estly to contemplate this new-born spiritual altitude; for
this statement demands demonstration.

Here you stand face to face with the laws of infinite [30]
Spirit, and behold for the first time the irresistible con-
flict between the flesh and Spirit. You stand before the

[Page 17.]

awful detonations of Sinai. You hear and record the [1]
thunderings of the spiritual law of Life, as opposed to
the material law of death; the spiritual law of Love, as
opposed to the material sense of love; the law of om-
nipotent harmony and good, as opposed to any supposi- [5]
titious law of sin, sickness, or death. And, before the
flames have died away on this mount of revelation, like
the patriarch of old, you take off your shoes--lay aside
your material appendages, human opinions and doc-
trines, give up your more material religion with its rites [10]
and ceremonies, put off your _materia medica_ and hygiene
as worse than useless--to sit at the feet of Jesus. Then,
you meekly bow before the Christ, the spiritual idea
that our great Master gave of the power of God to heal
and to save. Then it is that you behold for the first [15]
time the divine Principle that redeems man from under
the curse of materialism,--sin, disease, and death.
This spiritual birth opens to the enraptured understand-
ing a much higher and holier conception of the supremacy
of Spirit, and of man as His likeness, whereby man reflects [20]
the divine power to heal the sick.

A material or human birth is the appearing of a mor-
tal, not the immortal man. This birth is more or less
prolonged and painful, according to the timely or un-
timely circumstances, the normal or abnormal material [25]
conditions attending it.

With the spiritual birth, man's primitive, sinless,
spiritual existence dawns on human thought,--through
the travail of mortal mind, hope deferred, the perishing
pleasure and accumulating pains of sense,--by which [30]
one loses himself as matter, and gains a truer sense of
Spirit and spi