0.0 – Christian Science – 16 Books by Mary Baker Eddy – Bk 3 – No and Yes – Chpt 8 – Is There a Personal Deity

  	                    IS THERE A PERSONAL DEITY? 

  	    God is infinite. He is neither a limited mind nor a
12	limited body. God is Love; and Love is Principle, not
  	person. What the person of the infinite is, we know not;
  	but we are gratefully and lovingly conscious of the father-
15	liness of this Supreme Being. God is individual, and man
  	is His individualized idea. While material man and the
  	physical senses receive no spiritual idea, and feel no sen-
18	sation of divine Love, spiritual man and his spiritual
  	senses are drinking in the nature and essence of the indi-
  	vidual infinite. A sinful sense is incompetent to understand
21	the realities of being, — that Life is God, and that man
  	is in His image and likeness. A sinner can take no cog-
  	nizance of the noumenon or the phenomena of Spirit;
24	but leaving sin, sense rises to the fulness of the stature of
  	man in Christ. 
  	    Person is formed after the manner of mortal man,  so
 
   
No and Yes by Mary Baker Eddy                                                 20


 1	far as he can conceive of personality. Limitless person-
  	ality is inconceivable. His person and perfection are
 3	neither self-created, nor discerned through imperfection;
  	and of God as a person, human reason, imagination, and
  	revelation give us no knowledge. Error would fashion
 6	Deity in a manlike mould, while Truth is moulding a
  	Godlike man. 
  	    When the term divine Principle is used to signify Deity
 9	it may seem distant or cold, until better apprehended. 
  	This Principle is Mind, substance, Life, Truth, Love. 
  	When understood, Principle is found to be the only term
12	that fully conveys the ideas of God, — one Mind, a perfect
  	man, and divine Science. As the divine Principle is com-
  	prehended, God's omnipotence and omnipresence will
15	dawn on mortals, and the notion of an everywhere-present
  	body — or of an infinite Mind starting from a finite body,
  	and returning to it — will disappear. 
18	    Ever-present Love must seem ever absent to ever-present
  	selfishness or material sense. Hence this asking amiss
  	and receiving not, and the common idolatry of man-
21	worship. In divine Science, God is recognized as the
  	only power, presence, and glory. 
  	    Adam's mistiness and Satan's reasoning, ever since the
24	flood, — when specimens of every kind emerged from the
  	ark, — have run through the veins of all human philoso-
  	phy. Human reason is a blind guide, a continued series
27	of mortal hypotheses, antagonistic to Revelation and Sci-
  	ence. It is continually straying into forbidden by-paths
 
   
No and Yes by Mary Baker Eddy                                                 21


 1	of sensualism, contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus
  	and Paul, and the vision of the Apocalypse. Human
 3	philosophy has ninety-nine parts of error to the one-
  	hundredth part of Truth, — an unsafe decoction for the
  	race. The Science that Jesus demonstrated, whose views
 6	of Truth Confucius and Plato but dimly discerned, Science
  	and Health interprets. It was not a search after wisdom;
  	it was wisdom, and it grasped in spiritual law the uni-
 9	verse, — all time, space, immortality, thought, extension. 
  	This Science demonstrated the Principle of all phenomena,
  	identity, individuality, law; and showed man as reflect-
12	ing God and the divine capacity. Human philosophy
  	would dethrone perfection, and substitute matter and evil
  	for divine means and ends. 
15	    Human philosophy has an undeveloped God, who un-
  	folds Himself through material modes, wherein the human
  	and divine mingle in the same realm and consciousness. 
18	This is rank infidelity; because by it we lose God's ways
  	and perpetuate the supposed power and reality of evil ad
  	infinitum. Christian Science rends this veil in the pantheon
21	of many gods, and reproduces the teachings of Jesus, whose
  	philosophy is incontestable, bears the strain of time, and
  	brings in the glories of eternity; "for other foundation
24	can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 
  	    Divine philosophy is demonstrably the true idea of the
  	Christ, wherein Principle heals and saves. A philosophy
27	which cannot heal the sick has little resemblance to Sci-
  	ence, and is, to say the least, like a cloud without rain,
 
   
No and Yes by Mary Baker Eddy                                                 22


 1	"driven about by every wind of doctrine." Such phi-
  	losophy has certainly not touched the hem of the Christ
 3	garment. 
  	    Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop
  	Berkeley, were once clothed with a "brief authority;"
 6	but Berkeley ended his metaphysical theory with a treatise
  	on the healing properties of tar-water, and Hegel was an
  	inveterate snuff-taker. The circumlocution and cold cate-
 9	gories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals,
  	morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled meta-
  	physical systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Com-
12	pared with the inspired wisdom and infinite meaning of
  	the Word of Truth, they are as moonbeams to the sun, or
  	as Stygian night to the kindling dawn. SHOW ALL