of which "Science and Health" takes no
account--the conditioning of conscious life and working experience by
its material environment however conceived. This is true of every phase
of life and all our later emphasis upon the power of the mind in one
direction and another to escape this conditioning scarcely affects the
massive reality of it. Christian Science makes no attempt at all to
escape this--save in the region of physical health--or else it provides
an alibi in the phrase, "I have not demonstrated in that region yet."
But it does not thus escape the limitation imposed upon us all and if
we may dare for a moment to be dogmatic, it never will. At the best we
live in a give and take and if, through discipline and widening
knowledge, we may push back a little the frontiers which limit us, and
assert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is so
intimately associated, we do even this slowly and at great cost and
always in conformity with the laws of the matter we master.

There is a body of evidence here which can no more be ignored than
gravitation, and we best dispose of association of personality with the
material fabric of the body and the world of which it is a part, not by
denying their mutual interdependence but by discovering therein the laws
and methods of an infinite wisdom. Here are ministries through which we
come to consciousness of ourselves, here are materials upon which we
exercise our power, here are realities which hold us fast to normal and
intelligible lives, here are masters whose rule is kind and servants
whose obediences empower us. They condition our happinesses as well as
our unhappinesses and supply for us the strings of that harp of the
senses upon which the music of life is played. Life really gains its
spiritual content through the action and interaction of the aspiring
self upon its environment--whether that environment be intimate as the
protest of a disturbed bodily cell or remote as Orion and the
Pleiades.[39] The very words which Mrs. Eddy uses would be idle if this
were not so and though a thoroughgoing defender of her system may read
into its lines a permission for all this, the fundamentals of her system
deny it.

[Footnote 39: "And I am inclined to think that the error of forgetting
that spirit in order to be real or that principles, whether of morality,
religion or knowledge, must be exemplified in temporal facts, is a no
less disastrous error than that of the scie