Incorrect theories
The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter
to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and
73:21 desires, is incorrect. Equally incorrect is the
belief that spirit is confined in a finite, ma-
terial body, from which it is freed by death, and that, when
73:24 it is freed from the material body, spirit retains the sensa-
tions belonging to that body.
No me-diumship
It is a grave mistake to suppose that matter is any part
73:27 of the reality of intelligent existence, or that Spirit and
matter, intelligence and non-intelligence, can
commune together. This error Science will
73:30 destroy. The sensual cannot be made the mouthpiece of
the spiritual, nor can the finite become the channel of
the infinite. There is no communication between so-
74:1 called material existence and spiritual life which is not
subject to death.
Opposing conditions
74:3 To be on communicable terms with Spirit, persons must
be free from organic bodies; and their return to a mate-
rial condition, after having once left it, would
74:6 be as impossible as would be the restoration
to its original condition of the acorn, already absorbed
into a sprout which has risen above the soil. The seed
74:9 which has germinated has a new form and state of exist-
ence. When here or hereafter the belief of life in matter
is extinct, the error which has held the belief dissolves
74:12 with the belief, and never returns to the old condition.
No correspondence nor communion can exist between
persons in such opposite dreams as the belief of having
74:15 died and left a material body and the belief of still living
in an organic, material body.
Bridgeless division
The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect,
74:18 is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to
fraternize with or control the worm. Such
a backward transformation is impossible in
74:21 Science. Darkness and light, infancy and manhood,
sickness and health, are opposites, - different beliefs,
which never blend. Who will say that infancy can utter
74:24 the ideas of manhood, that darkness can represent light,
that we are in Europe when we are in the opposite hemi-
sphere? There is no bridge across the gulf which divides
74:27 two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incor-
poreal, and the physical, or corporeal.
In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step,
74:30 never a return to positions outgrown. The so-called dead
and living cannot commune together, for they are in
separate states of existence, or consciousness.
Unscientific investiture