SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION - The Mary Baker Eddy Science Institute

After presenting the spiritual universe in Genesis I, the Bibleintroduces this inverted view with the words, “But there went up amist from the earth” (Gen 2:6). Reasoning from material grounds, weare indeed mystified and confused. In the mist everything is distorted,instead of man as the spiritual image and likeness we have apersonal sense of God and a corporeal sense of' man made of thedust of the ground. In his delusion, this Adam dreams that he ismade, not of God's nature, but of animality. Once he dreams he isseparated from his divine Principle, he comes to believe that he is adivided self, Adam and Eve or subject and object. In its brilliantanalysis, the Bible then provides this dream with a voice, a talkingserpent, whose forked tongue argues for the reality of both good andevil (see Gen 3:1-5; S & H 545:21-30). (The lie that there can be bothGod and the serpent is the serpent. ) Thus man is fooled and set onthe wrong track, - until Christ Jesus exposes the deception: “He wasa murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, becausethere is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of hisown: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). In this manner,side by side with the voice of Truth, the Bible points out the languageof' lies.The lie has absolutely no existence except as the supposed negationof' the truth. Without the light, there could be no shadow. ThereforeScience and Health , with divine assurance, explains it as error, asmistranslation, misinterpretation and so on. We read, for example,“Mind creates His own likeness in ideas, and the substance of anidea is very far from being the supposed substance of non-intelligentmatter. Hence the Father Mind is not the father of matter. Thematerial senses and human conceptions would translate spiritualideas into material beliefs” (S & H 257:12).Another characteristic passage is, “Infinite Mind creates and governsall,. . . Creation is ever appearing, and must ever continue to appearfrom the nature of its inexhaustible source. Mortal sense inverts thisappearing and calls ideas material. Thus misinterpreted, the divineidea seems to fall to the level of a human or material belief, calledmortal man” (S & H 507:24). Further references: S & H I24:14-31;126:8-14; 127:23-29; 292:13-2;399:25-28; 546:9-22.26