Christian Science is both demonstration and fruition, but how attenuated are our demonstration and realization of this Science!  Truth, in divine Science, is the stepping-stone to the understanding of God; but the broken and contrite heart soonest discerns this truth, even as the helpless sick are soonest healed by it.  Invalids say, “I have recovered from sickness;” when the fact really remains, in divine Science, that they never were sick.

The Christian saith, “Christ (God) died for me, and came to save me;” yet God dies not, and is the ever-presence that neither comes nor goes, and man is forever His image and likeness.  “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians iv. 18.) This is the mystery of godliness—­that God, good, is never absent, and there is none beside good.  Mortals can understand this only as they reach the Life of good, and learn that there is no Life in evil.  Then shall it appear that the true ideal of omnipotent and ever-present good is an ideal wherein and wherefor there is no evil.  Sin exists only as a sense, and not as Soul.  Destroy this sense of sin, and sin disappears.  Sickness, sin, or death is a false sense of Life and good.  Destroy this trinity of error, and you find Truth.

In Science, Christ never died.  In material sense Jesus died, and lived.  The fleshly Jesus seemed to die, though he did not.  The Truth or Life in divine Science—­undisturbed by human error, sin, and death—­saith forever, “I am the living God, and man is My idea, never in matter, nor resurrected from it.”  “Why seek ye the living among the dead?  He is not here, but is risen.”  (Luke xxiv. 5, 6.) Mortal sense, confining itself to matter, is all that can be buried or resurrected.

Mary had risen to discern faintly God’s ever-presence, and that of His idea, man; but her mortal sense, reversing Science and spiritual understanding, interpreted this appearing as a risen Christ.  The I AM was neither buried nor resurrected.  The Way, the Truth, and the Life were never absent for a moment.  This trinity of Love lives and reigns forever.  Its kingdom, not apparent to material sense, never disappeared to spiritual sense, but remained forever in the Science of being.  The so-called appearing, disappearing, and reappearing of ever-presence, in whom is no variableness or shadow of turning, is the false human sense of that light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

Summary

All that is, God created.  If sin has any pretense of existence, God is responsible therefor; but there is no reality in sin, for God can no more behold it, or acknowledge it, than the sun can coexist with darkness.

To build the individual spiritual sense, conscious of only health, holiness, and heaven, on the foundations of an eternal Mind which is conscious of sickness, sin, and death, is a moral impossibility; for “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid.” (1 Corinthians iii. 11.) The nearer we approximate to such a Mind, even if it were (or could be) God, the more real those mind-pictures would become to us; until the hope of ever eluding their dread presence must yield to despair, and the haunting sense of evil forever accompany our being.