Article April 17, 1902 Issue

The Knowledge of God

BY A. S.

One of the great destructions, of the many made by Science and Health, is the destruction of the lean and hungry doubt that hung about my footsteps on my way to knowledge of the reality and immanence of God. In the old intellectual or rational thought (if one may so call it) a knowledge of God was based by most writers on evidence; inferences from nature in general, from the ethical nature of man, up to a high probability at best. There was always the lurking doubt "perhaps," "perhaps;" and if a man would not face the "perhaps, then it was blind belief covered over with the hoary sophistries of the Egyptian priestcraft about "belief on authority. With Science and Health properly understood, however, God witnesses Himself to the consciousness by His immediate presence, more real, more definite, and more unmistakable than the presence of your dearest friend. How natural and simple this is.

If you desired your friend to know that you were near him you would not send dumb messengers who could only make signs to describe your appearance, your clothes, etc., so that your friend might infer that you were somewhere near, but you would go to him and talk with him and he would see you and no longer be left to inference, in which there was doubt, would now know you in propria persona. Yet the world all along has been giving God credit for less wisdom than the ordinary man in the street. And the certainty of this Divine Reality is from no mere disordered imagination, hazy and difficult to perceive, as some of the visions of the mystics, following fasting and agony, but natural and clear like the sunlight which streams into your window as the morning breaks through the night.

To deny personal sense therefore, to reject all sense of limitation to the power of the Divine to manifest himself to all. in any manner, and under all so-called material impossibilities, is to me the basic message of Science and Health: for once properly understood, God is the destruction of all disease, poverty, and unhappiness; and better than all, He is the destruction of that old miserable material consciousness that even when to material sense all was normal, perfect bodily health. all material wants supplied, friends in abundance and ambitions realized, still. in spite of all, held misery as its dearest friend. And why? We now know why. It was because it was itself misery; for belief in matter, howsoever glossed over, is the heir of misery and the Father of despair. This was a hard lesson to learn because there came the insidious ignorance of the mortal mind to say, "Well, matter is not all bad, it is simply its misuse that is wrong, and it can be an instrument for good and happiness if properly regarded." I tried to adapt this to the teaching of Science and Health. It seems to be the natural outlet of the folly of the passing mortal mind to try to add to the Truth. Of course I received a fool's wages for, matter adopted, discord immediately followed, then the mists and cloudiness of mind and the unending contradictions and absurdities of human metaphysics and physical science, and I felt "Chaos is come again." A little further reading of Science and Health, a radical stand on the Truth "that matter is a false concept of mortal mind," and that to-day is the Truth perfect without the aid of matter as through all eternity, and immediately the clouds and mists vanished, the discords were no more, and the reality of the only real enfolded my life.

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