sickness, so is it with sin. To admit that sin has any claim
whatever, just or unjust, is to admit a dangerous fact. Hence the fact must
be denied; for if sin's claim be allowed in any degree, then sin destroys
the _at-one-ment_, or oneness with God,--a unity which sin recognizes as
its most potent and deadly enemy.

If God knows sin, even as a false claimant, then acquaintance with that
claimant becomes legitimate to mortals, and this knowledge would not be
forbidden; but God forbade man to know evil at the very beginning, when
Satan held it up before man as something desirable and a distinct addition
to human wisdom, because the knowledge of evil would make man a god,--a
representation that God both knew and admitted the dignity of evil.

Which is right,--God, who condemned the knowledge of sin and disowned its
acquaintance, or the serpent, who pushed that claim with the glittering
audacity of diabolical and sinuous logic?

Suffering from Others' Thoughts

Jesus accepted the one fact whereby alone the rule of Life can be
demonstrated,--namely, that there is no death.

In his real self he bore no infirmities. Though "a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief," as Isaiah says of him, he bore not _his_ sins, but
_ours_, "in his own body on the tree." "He was bruised for _our_
iniquities; ... and with his stripes we are healed."

He was the Way-shower; and Christian Scientists who would demonstrate "the
way" must keep close to his path, that they may win the prize. "The way,"
in the flesh, is the suffering which leads out of the flesh. "The way," in
Spirit, is "the way" of Life, Truth, and Love, redeeming us from the false
sense of the flesh and the wounds it bears. This threefold Messiah reveals
the self-destroying ways of error and the life-giving way of Truth.

Job's faith and hope gained him the assurance that the so-called sufferings
of the flesh are unreal. We shall learn how false are the pleasures and
pains of material sense, and behold the truth of being, as expressed in his
conviction, "Yet in my flesh shall I see God;" that is, Now and here shall
I behold God, divine Love.

The chaos of mortal mind is made the stepping-stone to the cosmos of
immortal Mind.

If Jesus suffered, as the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the
mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter,
and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God. Not his
own sins, but the