"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 of the body.
"The invisible essence of life is also the true substance, the reliable and changeless something, upon which we may forever depend. We use the word substance in its etymological sense (from sub, under and stare, to stand), and since Spirit or Mind is the reality that underlies every material or sensible object, there is no substance to the object itself.
"Plato taught that 'ideas, are the only real things.' Ideas are expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are expressions of mind, and this reasoning brings us back to God as Mind and Mind as Cause. Admitting Mind or Spirit to be the life and substance back of or expressing itself through the body, we may easily see that intelligence can not exist apart from Mind, and hence can not belong to matter.
"That the mind or intelligence is seated in the gray convolutions of the brain, is held by the materialists, and yet Dr. Laycock affirms 'that matter is fundamentally nothing more than that which is the seat of motion to ends, of which mind is the source and cause.' Professor Huxley crowns the statement by saying, 'That which perceives or knows is mind or spirit, and therefore, that knowledge which the senses give us, is, after all, a knowledge of spiritual phenomena.' Professor Faraday held to the immateriality of physical objects.
"In the language of Jesus the Christ, we are told, 'Spirit is all, the flesh profiteth nothing;' thus from all classes of conscientious but confessedly diverse thinkers, we find statements of universal truth, and this is what the hungry, starving world is seeking with more earnestness than ever before.
"Since there is no life, substance or intelligence in matter, it will be comparatively easy to prove that there can be no sensation, for where there is no life in the body, there can be no feeling. Even the physiologists tell us mind must know pain before it can be located in the body. We state therefore a theorem which is practically demonstrated; there is no sensation in matter.