Which is right,—­God, who condemned the knowledge of sin and disowned its acquaintance, or the serpent, who pushed that claim with the glittering audacity of diabolical and sinuous logic?

Suffering from Others’ Thoughts

Jesus accepted the one fact whereby alone the rule of Life can be demonstrated,—­namely, that there is no death.

In his real self he bore no infirmities.  Though “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” as Isaiah says of him, he bore not his sins, but ours, “in his own body on the tree.”  “He was bruised for our iniquities; ... and with his stripes we are healed.”

He was the Way-shower; and Christian Scientists who would demonstrate “the way” must keep close to his path, that they may win the prize.  “The way,” in the flesh, is the suffering which leads out of the flesh.  “The way,” in Spirit, is “the way” of Life, Truth, and Love, redeeming us from the false sense of the flesh and the wounds it bears.  This threefold Messiah reveals the self-destroying ways of error and the life-giving way of Truth.

Job’s faith and hope gained him the assurance that the so-called sufferings of the flesh are unreal.  We shall learn how false are the pleasures and pains of material sense, and behold the truth of being, as expressed in his conviction, “Yet in my flesh shall I see God;” that is, Now and here shall I behold God, divine Love.

The chaos of mortal mind is made the stepping-stone to the cosmos of immortal Mind.

If Jesus suffered, as the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter, and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God.  Not his own sins, but the sins of the world, “crucified the Lord of glory,” and “put him to an open shame.”

Holding a quickened sense of false environment, and suffering from mentality in opposition to Truth, are significant of that state of mind which the actual understanding of Christian Science first eliminates and then destroys.

In the divine order of Science every follower of Christ shares his cup of sorrows.  He also suffereth in the flesh, and from the mentality which opposes the law of Spirit; but the divine law is supreme, for it freeth him from the law of sin and death.

Prophets and apostles suffered from the thoughts of others.  Their conscious being was not fully exempt from physicality and the sense of sin.

Until he awakes from his delusion, he suffers least from sin who is a hardened sinner.  The hypocrite’s affections must first be made to fret in their chains; and the pangs of hell must lay hold of him ere he can change from flesh to Spirit, become acquainted with that Love which is without dissimulation and endureth all things.  Such mental conditions as ingratitude, lust, malice, hate, constitute the miasma of earth.  More obnoxious than Chinese stenchpots are these dispositions which offend the spiritual sense.