God is infinite. He is neither a limited mind nor a 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 fatherliness 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 sensation of divine Love, spiritual man and his spiritual senses are drinking in the nature and essence of the individual infinite. A sinful sense is incompetent to understand the realities of being,--that Life is God, and that man is in His image and likeness. A sinner can take no cognizance of the noumenon or the phenomena of Spirit; 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 far as he can conceive of personality. Limitless personality is inconceivable. His person and perfection are 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 Deity in a manlike mould, while Truth is moulding a Godlike man.
When the term divine Principle is used to signify Deity 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 that fully conveys the ideas of God,--one Mind, a perfect man, and divine Science. As the divine Principle is comprehended, God's omnipotence and omnipresence will 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.
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-worship. In divine Science, God is recognized as the only power, presence, and glory.
Adam's mistiness and Satan's reasoning, ever since the flood,--when specimens of every kind emerged from the ark,--have run through the veins of all human philosophy. Human reason is a blind guide, a continued series of mortal hypotheses, antagonistic to Revelation and Science. It is continually straying into forbidden by-paths of sensualism, contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus and Paul, and the vision of the Apocalypse. Human 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 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 universe,--all time, space, immortality, thought, extension. This Science demonstrated the Principle of all phenomena, identity, individuality, law; and showed man as reflecting God and the divine capacity. Human philosophy would dethrone perfection, and substitute matter and evil for divine means and ends.
Human philosophy has an undeveloped God, who unfolds Himself through material modes, wherein the human and divine mingle in the same realm and consciousness. 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 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 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 which cannot heal the sick has little resemblance to Science, and is, to say the least, like a cloud without rain, "driven about by every wind of doctrine." Such philosophy has certainly not touched the hem of the Christ garment.
Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop Berkeley, were once clothed with a "brief authority;" 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 categories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals, morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled metaphysical systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Compared 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. MBE