The improved theory and practice of religion and of medicine are mainly due to the people's improved views of the Supreme Being. As the finite sense of Deity, based on material conceptions of spiritual being, yields its grosser elements, we shall learn what God is, and what God does. The Hebrew term that gives another letter to the word God and makes it good, unites Science and Christianity, whereby we learn that God, good, is universal, and the divine Principle,—Life, Truth, Love; and this Principle is learned through goodness, and of Mind instead of matter, of Soul instead of the senses, and by revelation supporting reason. It is the false conceptions of Spirit, based on the evidences gained from the material senses, that make a Christian only in theory, shockingly material in practice, and form its Deity out of the worst human qualities, else of wood or stone.
Such a theory has overturned empires in demoniacal contests over religion. Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age, has been dematerialized and unfinited has their Deity become good; no longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and Love,—Life without beginning or ending, Truth without a lapse or error, and Love universal, infinite, eternal. This more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations as well as individuals, and will lift man ultimately to the understanding that our ideals form our characters, that as a man "thinketh in his heart, so is he." The crudest ideals of speculative theology have made monsters of men; and the ideals of materia medica have made helpless invalids and cripples. The eternal roasting amidst noxious vapors; the election of the minority to be saved and the majority to be eternally punished; the wrath of God, to be appeased by the sacrifice and torture of His favorite Son,—are some of the false beliefs that have produced sin, sickness, and death; and then would affirm that these are natural, and that Christianity and Christ-healing are preternatural; yea, that make a mysterious God and a natural devil.
Let us rejoice that the bow of omnipotence already spans the moral heavens with light, and that the more spiritual idea of good and Truth meets the old material thought like a promise upon the cloud, while it inscribes on the thoughts of men at this period a more metaphysical religion founded upon Christian Science. A personal God is based on finite premises, where thought begins wrongly to apprehend the infinite, even the quality or the quantity of eternal good. This limited sense of God as good limits human thought and action in their goodness, and assigns them mortal fetters in the outset. It has implanted in our religions certain unspiritual shifts, such as dependence on personal pardon for salvation, rather than obedience to our Father's demands, whereby we grow out of sin in the way that our Lord has appointed; namely, by working out our own salvation. It has given to all systems of materia medica nothing but materialism,—more faith in hygiene and drugs than in God. Idolatry sprang from the belief that God is a form, more than an infinite and divine Mind; sin, sickness, and death originated in the belief that Spirit materialized into a body, infinity became finity, or man, and the eternal entered the temporal. Mythology, or the myth of ologies, said that Life, which is infinite and eternal, could enter finite man through his nostrils, and matter become intelligent of good and evil, because a serpent said it. When first good, God, was named a person, and evil another person, the error that a personal God and a personal devil entered into partnership and would form a third person, called material man, obtained expression. But these unspiritual and mysterious ideas of God and man are far from correct.
The glorious Godhead is Life, Truth, and Love, and these three terms for one divine Principle are the three in one that can be understood, and that find no reflection in sinning, sick, and dying mortals. No miracle of grace can make a spiritual mind out of beliefs that are as material as the heathen deities. The pagan priests appointed Apollo and Esculapius the gods of medicine, and they inquired of these heathen deities what drugs to prescribe. Systems of religion and of medicine grown out of such false ideals of the Supreme Being cannot heal the sick and cast out devils, error. Eschewing a materialistic and idolatrous theory and practice of medicine and religion, the apostle devoutly recommends the more spiritual Christianity,—"one Lord, one faith, one baptism." The prophets and apostles, whose lives are the embodiment of a living faith, have not taken away our Lord, that we know not where they have laid him; they have resurrected a deathless life of love; and into the cold materialisms of dogma and doctrine we look in vain for their more spiritual ideal, the risen Christ, whose materia medica and theology were one.
The ideals of primitive Christianity are nigh, even at our door. Truth is not lost in the mists of remoteness or the barbarisms of spiritless codes. The right ideal is not buried, but has risen higher to our mortal sense, and having overcome death and the grave, wrapped in a pure winding-sheet, it sitteth beside the sepulchre in angel form, saying unto us, "Life is God; and our ideal of God has risen above the sod to declare His omnipotence." This white-robed thought points away from matter and doctrine, or dogma, to the diviner sense of Life and Love,—yea, to the Principle that is God, and to the demonstration thereof in healing the sick. Let us then heed this heavenly visitant, and not entertain the angel unawares.
The ego is not self-existent matter animated by mind, but in itself is mind; therefore a Truth-filled mind makes a pure Christianity and a healthy mind and body. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in a lecture before the Harvard Medical School: "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse writes: "I am sick of learned quackery." Dr. Abercrombie, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, writes: "Medicine is the science of guessing." Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon Extraordinary to the King, says: "I declare my conscientious belief, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there was not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now obtains." Voltaire says: "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."
Believing that man is the victim of his Maker, we naturally fear God more than we love Him; whereas "perfect Love casteth out fear;" but when we learn God aright, we love Him, because He is found altogether lovely. Thus it is that a more spiritual and true ideal of Deity improves the race physically and spiritually. God is no longer a mystery to the Christian Scientist, but a divine Principle, understood in part, because the grand realities of Life and Truth are found destroying sin, sickness, and death; and it should no longer be deemed treason to understand God, when the Scriptures enjoin us to "acquaint now thyself with Him [God], and be at peace;" we should understand something of that great good for which we are to leave all else.
Periods and peoples are characterized by their highest or their lowest ideals, by their God and their devil. We are all sculptors, working out our own ideals, and leaving the impress of mind on the body as well as on history and marble, chiselling to higher excellence, or leaving to rot and ruin the mind's ideals. Recognizing this as we ought, we shall turn often from marble to model, from matter to Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives.
"Chisel in hand stood a sculptor-boy,
With his marble block before him;
And his face lit up with a smile of joy
As an angel dream passed o'er him.
He carved the dream on that shapeless stone
With many a sharp incision.
With heaven's own light the sculptor shone,—
He had caught the angel-vision.
"Sculptors of life are we as we stand
With our lives uncarved before us,
Waiting the hour when at God's command
Our life dream passes o'er us.
If we carve it then on the yielding stone
With many a sharp incision,
Its heavenly beauty shall be our own,—
Our lives that angel-vision."