SPEAKING absolutely, there is no such thing as separation. On page 465 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes, "Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe." This is the same as saying that the divine First Cause and its effect, man and the universe, is one and inseparable. Such a statement leaves no room for any exception. Even in the case of any subdivision which may take place, in the sense in which Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 511 of Science and Health, "This Mind forms ideas, its own images, subdivides and radiates their borrowed light, intelligence, and so explains the Scripture phrase, 'whose seed is in itself,' " there is no possibility of division. "These ideas range," Mrs. Eddy says again, on page 503 of Science and Health, "from the infinitesimal to infinity, and the highest ideas are the sons and daughters of God." This, it will be seen, leaves no possibility of separation anywhere. The whole question of separation lies in the limitations of the human mind, with its ideals of good and evil.

The human mind, counterfeiting the spiritual at every point, and producing, at every point, a distortion, indulges in a perfect orgy of separation. The writer of the Jehovistic account of creation in the book of Genesis set the seal on this division in the symbol of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now this knowledge of good and evil is, from an absolute metaphysical standpoint, an impossibility. God, good, being infinite, there can be no such thing as evil. Evil is nothing but a supposititious belief in the absence of good, and therefore a mentality which believes in good and evil really never believes in good at all. The good it accepts is, at the best, a modified sense of evil. It is a sense of material good, and matter being the counterfeit of Spirit, this material good must necessarily be a counterfeit of spiritual good. A tree which produced the fruit of good and evil would be of the nature of a house divided against itself, and the eating of its fruit would naturally produce death. What this means Jesus made perfectly clear on the occasion when he healed the man possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb.

The people in their amazement cried out, "Is not this the son of David?" But this was so perturbing to the Pharisees that they at once made answer, "This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils." It is certain that the Pharisees themselves were in the habit of condoning the efforts of the exorcists, and also that this was perfectly well known to the people. Jesus' reply, therefore, must have been utterly dumfounding to them. "Every kingdom," he said, "divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you." Anybody reading this can see that Jesus repudiated the idea that evil could cast out evil. A mind believing in good and evil was, of course, a mind believing in death, a house divided against itself, since a sense of material good was utterly powerless to overcome its sense of material evil. Spiritual healing, he made it plain, was accomplished by an understanding that good was the only power, and that evil was a false belief. Healing through the Spirit of God was healing through the knowledge of the allness of God and the nothingness of evil, and naturally produced the realization of the coming of the kingdom of God, that is, of spiritual harmony.

Jesus, then, obviously made a complete end of separation. Separation was a house divided against a house, a thing incapable of standing. The unity of God and man was expressed through the knowledge of the oneness of Mind and its idea, a knowledge which cast out devils through the realization that they were nothing but a state of hypnotic consciousness resulting from a belief in hypnotic cause known as mortal mind. The exorcists of the first century, like the necromancers of old, or the hypnotists of to-day, endeavored to cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. They imagined that by hypnotic suggestion the human mind could be forced to surrender one material belief in favor of another material belief, and in this way they seemed to produce a temporary effect, whilst in reality merely weakening their patient's normal power of material resistance to evil. "Neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 442 of Science and Health, "enters into the practice of Christian Science, in which truth cannot be reversed, but the reverse of error is true."

It is easy to see, then, how the whole false idea of separation is built up in the hypnotic consciousness produced by mortal mind. Starting with the idea of incompleteness instead of perfection, the suggestion of separation can be disseminated by what seems a natural argument. If you put an ocean between two people, you have separated their bodies, but inasmuch as their bodies are the subjective condition of their human minds, the suggestion to each of them becomes intensely real that separation has taken place. This, however, is entirely owing to the fact that they have been educated to believe, theologically, that God can be separated from man; in other words, that the impossible is possible, and that cause can be divided from its effect. If, instead of this, they had been taught that there was no such thing as an incomplete idea, they would have known that there could be no sense of separation in completeness; whilst, inasmuch as all divine ideas exist in the divine Mind, it is obvious that it is impossible to separate any individual idea from that Mind, and that each idea must reflect the perfection which is the inevitable condition of Principle, God.

It is because of this that the idea of separation becomes a metaphysical impossibility. There is no place where Principle is not. There is nowhere where Truth does not circulate. No matter where the individual may find his human body, his spiritual reality remains a divine idea inseparable from the divine Mind. He may imagine himself in a hopeless condition of grief and misery, in other words, in hell. But this hell is only a mental condition of his own making, which he can dissipate, at any moment, by the realization of the fact that divine Love being infinite, nothing but false belief separates him from divine Love at the precise moment when he is believing himself to be in hell. Let him only change his belief, let him substitute for the belief of good and evil an understanding of the infinity of good, and hell will give place instantaneously to heaven. This is precisely what the psalmist had in mind when he wrote, "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."

Frederick Dixon.