w of History_

All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy
says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the
understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not
intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no
mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of
cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and
reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical
sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and
painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful
activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a
discouraging view of human history.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization
most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and
of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If
the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the
fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than
they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry
has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that
Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come
about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed
out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the
intellect;--the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was
detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the
improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of
civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on
developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"--applying our
intelligence to the study of the physical universe--and have gone on
piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great
delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and
matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and
invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various
manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the
heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences
does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have
been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when
Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the