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GODLIKENESS St. Paul writes: "Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord." To attain peace and holiness is to recognize the divine presence and allness. Jesus said: "I am the way." Kindle the watch-fires of unselfed love, and they throw a light upon the uncomplaining agony in the life of our Lord; they open the enigmatical seals of the angel, standing in the sun, a glorified spiritual idea of the ever-present God -- in whom there is no darkness, but all is light, and man's immortal being. The meek might, sublime patience, wonderful works, and opening not his mouth in self-defense against false witnesses, express the life of Godlikeness. Fasting, feasting, or penance, -- merely outside forms of religion, -- fail to elucidate Christianity: they reach not the heart nor renovate it; they never destroy one iota of hypocrisy, pride, self-will, envy, or hate. The mere form of godliness, coupled with selfishness, worldliness, hatred, and lust, are knells tolling the burial of Christ.

Jesus said, "If ye love me, keep my commandments." He knew that obedience is the test of love; that one gladly obeys when obedience gives him happiness. Selfishly, or otherwise, all are ready to seek and obey what they love. When mortals learn to love aright; when they learn that man's highest happiness, that which has most of heaven in it, is in blessing others, and self-immolation -- they will obey both the old and the new commandment, and receive the reward of obedience.

Many sleep who should keep themselves awake and waken the world. Earth's actors change earth's scenes; and the curtain of human life should be lifted on reality, on that which outweighs time; on duty done and life perfected, wherein joy is real and fadeless. Who of the world's lovers ever found her true? It is wise to be willing to wait on God, and to be wiser than serpents; to hate no man, to love one's enemies, and to square accounts with each passing hour. Then thy gain outlives the sun, for the sun shines but to show man the beauty of holiness and the wealth of love. Happiness consists in being and in doing good; only what God gives, and what we give ourselves and others through His tenure, confers happiness: conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can. Consult thy everyday life; take its answer as to thy aims, motives, fondest purposes, and this oracle of years will put to flight all care for the world's soft flattery or its frown. Patience and resignation are the pillars of peace that, like the sun beneath the horizon, cheer the heart susceptible of light with promised joy. Be faithful at the temple gate of conscience, wakefully guard it; then thou wilt know when the thief cometh.

The constant spectacle of sin thrust upon the pure sense of the immaculate Jesus made him a man of sorrows. He lived when mortals looked ignorantly, as now, on the might of divine power manifested through man; only to mock, wonder, and perish. Sad to say, the cowardice and self-seeking of his disciples helped crown with thorns the life of him who broke not the bruised reed and quenched not the smoking flax, -- who caused not the feeble to fall, nor spared through false pity the consuming tares. Jesus was compassionate, true, faithful to rebuke, ready to forgive. He said, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." "Love one another, as I have loved you." No estrangement, no emulation, no deceit, enters into the heart that loves as Jesus loved. It is a false sense of love that, like the summer brook, soon gets dry. Jesus laid down his life for mankind; what more could he do? Beloved, how much of what he did are we doing? Yet he said, "The works that I do shall he do." When this prophecy of the great Teacher is fulfilled we shall have more effective healers and less theorizing; faith without proof loses its life, and it should be buried. The ignoble conduct of his disciples towards their Master, showing their unfitness to follow him, ended in the downfall of genuine Christianity, about the year 325, and the violent death of all his disciples save one.

The nature of Jesus made him keenly alive to the injustice, ingratitude, treachery, and brutality that he received. Yet behold his love! So soon as he burst the bonds of the tomb he hastened to console his unfaithful followers and to disarm their fears. Again: True to his divine nature, he rebuked them on the eve of his ascension, called one a "fool" -- then, lifting up his hands and blessing them, he rose from earth to heaven.

The Christian Scientist cherishes no resentment; he knows that that would harm him more than all the malice of his foes. Brethren, even as Jesus forgave, forgive thou. I say it with joy, -- no person can commit an offense against me that I cannot forgive. Meekness is the armor of a Christian, his shield and his buckler. He entertains angels who listens to the lispings of repentance seen in a tear -- happier than the conqueror of a world. To the burdened and weary, Jesus saith: "Come unto me." O glorious hope! there remaineth a rest for the righteous, a rest in Christ, a peace in Love. The thought of it stills complaint; the heaving surf of life's troubled sea foams itself away, and underneath is a deep-settled calm.

Are earth's pleasures, its ties, and its treasures, taken away from you? It is divine Love that doeth it, and sayeth, "Ye have need of all these things." A danger besets thy path? -- a spiritual behest, in reversion, awaits you.

The great Master triumphed in furnace fires. Then, Christian Scientists, trust, and trusting, you will find divine Science glorifies the cross and crowns the association with our Saviour in his life of love. There is no redundant drop in the cup that our Father permits us. Christ walketh over the wave; on the ocean of events, mounting the billow or going down into the deep, the voice of him who still the tempest saith, "It is I; be not afraid." Thus he bringeth us into the desired haven, the kingdom of Spirit; and the hues of heaven, tipping the dawn of everlasting day, joyfully whisper, "No drunkards within, no sorrow, no pain; and the glory of earth's woes is risen upon you, rewarding, satisfying, glorifying thy unfaltering faith and good works with the fulness of divine Love."

'T was God who gave that word of might

Which swelled creation's lay, --

"Let there be light, and there was light," --

That swept the clouds away;

'T was Love whose finger traced aloud

A bow of promise on the cloud.

Beloved brethren, are you ready to join me in this proposition, namely, in 1902 to begin ommitting our annual gathering at Pleasant View, -- thus breaking any seeming connection between the sacrament in our church and a pilgrimage to Concord? I shall be the loser by this change, for it gives me great joy to look into the faces of my dear church-members; but in this, as all else, I can bear the cross, while gratefully appreciating the privilege of meeting you all occasionally in the metropolis of my native State, whose good people welcome Christian Scientists.

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MESSAGE FOR 1901, by Mary Baker Eddy.

BELOVED brethren, to-day I extend my heart-and-hand-fellowship to the faithful, to those whose hearts have been beating through the mental avenues of mankind for God and humanity; and rest assured you can never lack God's outstretched arm so long as you are in His service. Our first communion in the new century finds Christian Science more extended, more rapidly advancing, better appreciated, than ever before, and nearer the whole world's acceptance.

To-day you meet to commemorate in unity the life of our Lord, and to rise higher and still higher in the individual consciousness most essential to your growth and usefulness; to add to your treasures of thought the great realities of being, which constitute mental and physical perfection. The baptism of the Spirit, and the refreshment and invigoration of the human in communion with the Divine, have brought you hither.

All that is true is a sort of necessity, a portion of the primal reality of things. Truth comes from a deep sincerity that must always characterize heroic hearts; it is the better side of man's nature developing itself.

As Christian Scientists you seek to define God to your own consciousness by feeling and applying the nature and practical possibilities of divine Love: to gain the absolute and supreme certainty that Christianity is now what Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated -- health, holiness, immortality. The highest spiritual Christianity in individual lives is indispensable to the acquiring of greater power in the perfected Science of healing all manner of diseases.

We know the healing standard of Christian Science was and is traduced by trying to put into the old garment the new-old cloth of Christian healing. To attempt to twist the fatal magnetic element of human will into harmony with divine power, or to substitute good words for good deeds, a fair seeming for right being, may suit the weak or the worldly who find the standard of Christ's healing too high for them. Absolute certainty in the practice of divine metaphysics constitutes its utility, since it has a divine and demonstrable Principle and rule -- if some fall short of Truth, others will attain it, and these are they who will adhere to it. The feverish pride of sects and systems is the death's-head at the feast of Love, but Christianity is ever storming sin in its citadels, blessing the poor in spirit and keeping peace with God.

What Jesus' disciples of old experienced, his followers of to-day will prove, namely, that a departure from the direct line in Christ costs a return under difficulties; darkness, doubt, and unrequited toil will beset all their returning footsteps. Only a firm foundation in Truth can give a fearless wing and a sure reward.

The history of Christian Science explains its rapid growth. In my church of over twenty-one thousand six hundred and thirty-one communicants (two thousand four hundred and ninety-six of whom have been added since last November) there spring spontaneously the higher hope, and increasing virtue, fervor, and fidelity. The special benediction of our Father-Mother God rests upon this hour: "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake." GOD IS THE INFINITE PERSON

We hear it said that Christian Scientists have no God because their God is not a person. Let us examine this. The loyal Christian Scientists absolutely adopt Webster's definition of God, "A Supreme Being," and the Standard dictionary's definition of God, "The one Supreme Being, self-existent and eternal." Also, we accept God, emphatically, in the higher definition derived from the Bible, and this accords with the literal sense of the lexicons: "God is Spirit," "God is Love." Then, to define Love in divine Science we use this phrase for God -- divine Principle. By this we mean Mind, a permanent, fundamental, intelligent, divine Being, called in Scripture, Spirit, Love.

It is sometimes said: "God is Love, but this is no argument that Love is God; for God is light, but light is not God." The first proposition is correct, and is not lost by the conclusion, for Love expresses the nature of God; but the last proposition does not illustrate the first, as light, being matter, loses the nature of God, Spirit, deserts its premise, and expresses God only in metaphor, therefore it is illogical and the conclusion is not properly drawn. It is logical that because God is Love, Love is divine Principle; then Love as either divine Principle or Person stands for God -- for both have the nature of God. In logic the major premise must be convertible to the minor.

In mathematics four times three is twelve, and three times four is twelve. To depart from the rule of mathematics destroys the proof of mathematics; just as a departure from the Principle and rule of divine Science destroys the ability to demonstrate Love according to Christ, healing the sick; and you lose its susceptibility of scientific proof.

God is the author of Science -- neither man nor matter can be. The Science of God must be, is, divine, predicated of Principle and demonstrated as divine Love; and Christianity is divine Science, else there is no Science and no Christianity.

We understand that God is personal in a scientific sense, but is not corporeal nor anthropomorphic. We understand that God is not finite; He is the infinite Person, but not three persons in one person. Christian Scientists are theists and monotheists. Those who misjudge us because we understand that God is the infinite One instead of three, should be able to explain God's personality rationally. Christian Scientists consistently conceive of God as One because He is infinite; and as triune, because He is Life, Truth, Love, and these three are one in essence and in office.

If in calling God "divine Principle," meaning divine Love, more frequently than Person, we merit the epithet "godless," we naturally conclude that he breaks faith with his creed, or has no possible conception of ours, who believes that three persons are defined strictly by the word Person, or as One; for if Person is God, and he believes three persons constitute the Godhead, does not Person here lose the nature of one God, lose monotheism, and become less coherent than the Christian Scientist's sense of Person as one divine infinite triune Principle, named in the Bible Life, Truth, Love? -- for each of these possesses the nature of all, and God omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient.

Man is person; therefore divine metaphysics discriminates between God and man, the creator and the created, by calling one the divine Principle of all. This suggests another query: Do Christian Scientists believe in personality? They do, but their personality is defined spiritually, not materially -- by Mind, not by matter. We do not blot out the material race of Adam, but leave all sin to God's fiat -- self-extinction, and to the final manifestation of the real spiritual man and universe. We believe, according to the Scriptures, that God is infinite Spirit or Person, and man is His image and likeness: therefore man reflects Spirit, not matter.

We are not transcendentalists to the extent of extinguishing anything that is real, good, or true; for God and man in divine Science, or the logic of Truth, are coexistent and eternal, and the nature of God must be seen in man, who is His eternal image and likeness.

The theological God as a Person necessitates a creed to explain both His person and nature, whereas God explains Himself in Christian Science. Is the human person, as defined by Christian Science, more transcendental than theology's three divine persons, that live in the Father and have no separate identity? Who says the God of theology is a Person, and the God of Christian Science is not a person, hence no God? Here is the departure. Person is defined differently by theology, which reckons three as one and the infinite in a finite form, and Christian Science, which reckons one as one and this one infinite.

Can the infinite Mind inhabit a finite form? Is the God of theology a finite or an infinite Person? Is He one Person, or three persons? Who can conceive either of three persons as one person, or of three infinites? We hear that God is not God except He be a Person, and this Person contains three persons: yet God must be One although He is three. Is this pure, specific Christianity? and is God in Christian Science no God because He is not after this model of personality?

The logic of divine Science being faultless, its consequent Christianity is consistent with Christ's hillside sermon, which is set aside to some degree, regarded as impracticable for human use, its theory even seldom named.

God is Person in the infinite scientific sense of Him, but He can neither be one nor infinite in the corporeal or anthropomorphic sense.

Our departure from theological personality is, that God's personality must be as infinite as Mind is. We believe in God as the infinite Person; but lose all conceivable idea of Him as a finite Person with an infinite Mind. That God is either inconceivable, or is manlike, is not my sense of Him. In divine Science He is "altogether lovely," and consistently conceivable as the personality of infinite Love, infinite Spirit, than whom there is none other.

Scholastic theology makes God manlike; Christian Science makes man Godlike. The trinity of the Godhead in Christian Science being Life, Truth, Love, constitutes the individuality of the infinite Person or divine intelligence called God.

Again, God being infinite Mind, He is the all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving Father-Mother, for God made man in His own image and likeness, and made them male and female as the Scriptures declare; then does not our heavenly Parent -- the divine Mind -- include within this Mind the thoughts that express the different mentalities of man and woman, whereby we may consistently say, "Our Father-Mother God"? And does not this heavenly Parent know and supply the differing needs of the individual mind even as the Scriptures declare He will?

Because Christian Scientists call their God "divine Principle," as well as infinite Person, they have not taken away their Lord, and know not where they have laid Him. They do not believe there must be something tangible to the personal material senses in order that belief may attend their petitions to divine Love. The God whom all Christians now claim to believe in and worship cannot be conceived of on that basis; He cannot be apprehended through the material senses, nor can they gain any evidence of His presence thereby. Jesus said, "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." CHRIST IS ONE AND DIVINE

Again I reiterate this cardinal point: There is but one Christ, and Christ is divine -- the Holy Ghost, or spiritual idea of the divine Principle, Love. Is this scientific statement more transcendental than the belief of our brethren, who regard Jesus as God and the Holy Ghost as the third person in the Godhead? When Jesus said, "I and my Father are one," and "my Father is greater than I," this was said in the sense that one ray of light is light, and it is one with light, but it is not the full-orbed sun. Therefore we have the authority of Jesus for saying Christ is not God, but an impartation of Him.

Again: Is man, according to Christian Science, more transcendental than God made him? Can he be too spiritual, since Jesus said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect"? Is God Spirit? He is. Then is man His image and likeness, according to Holy Writ? He is. Then can man be material, or less than spiritual? As God made man, is he not wholly spiritual? The reflex image of Spirit is not unlike Spirit. The logic of divine metaphysics makes man none too transcendental, if we follow the teachings of the Bible.

The Christ was Jesus' spiritual selfhood; therefore Christ existed prior to Jesus, who said, "Before Abraham was, I am." Jesus, the only immaculate, was born of a virgin mother, and Christian Science explains that mystic saying of the Master as to his dual personality, or the spiritual and material Christ Jesus, called in Scripture the Son of God and the Son of man -- explains it as referring to his eternal spiritual selfhood and his temporal manhood. Christian Science shows clearly that God is the only generating or regenerating power.

The ancient worthies caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah or Christ, and their truer sense of Christ baptized them in Spirit -- submerged them in a sense so pure it made seers of men, and Christian healers. This is the "Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," spoken of by St. Paul. It is also the mysticism complained of by the rabbis, who crucified Jesus and called him a "deceiver." Yea, it is the healing power of Truth that is persecuted to-day, the spirit of divine Love, and Christ Jesus possessed it, practised it, and taught his followers to do likewise. This spirit of God is made manifest in the flesh, healing and saving men, -- it is the Christ, Comforter, "which taketh away the sin of the world;" and yet Christ is rejected of men!

The evil in human nature foams at the touch of good; it crieth out, "Let us alone; what have we to do with thee,... ? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God." The Holy Spirit takes of the things of God and showeth them unto the creature; and these things being spiritual, they disturb the carnal and destroy it; they are revolutionary, reformatory, and -- now, as aforetime -- they cast out evils and heal the sick. He of God's household who loveth and liveth most the things of Spirit, receiveth them most; he speaketh wisely, for the spirit of his Father speaketh through him; he worketh well and healeth quickly, for the spirit giveth him liberty: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Jesus said, "For all these things they will deliver you up to the councils" and "If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed."

Christ being the Son of God, a spiritual, divine emanation, Christ must be spiritual, not material. Jesus was the son of Mary, therefore the son of man only in the sense that man is the generic term for both male and female. The Christ was not human. Jesus was human, but the Christ Jesus represented both the divine and the human, God and man. The Science of divine metaphysics removes the mysticism that used to enthrall my sense of the Godhead, and of Jesus as the Son of God and the son of man. Christian Science explains the nature of God as both Father and Mother.

Theoretically and practically man's salvation comes through "the riches of His grace" in Christ Jesus. Divine Love spans the dark passage of sin, disease, and death with Christ's righteousness, -- the atonement of Christ, whereby good destroys evil, -- and the victory over self, sin, disease, and death, is won after the pattern of the mount. This is working out our own salvation, for God worketh with us, until there shall be nothing left to perish or to be punished, and we emerge gently into Life everlasting. This is what the Scriptures demand -- faith according to works.

After Jesus had fulfilled his mission in the flesh as the Son of man, he rose to the fulness of his stature in Christ, the eternal Son of God, that never suffered and never died. And because of Jesus' great work on earth, his demonstration over sin, disease, and death, the divine nature of Christ Jesus has risen to human apprehension, and we see the Son of man in divine Science; and he is no longer a material man, and mind is no longer in matter. Through this redemptive Christ, Truth, we are healed and saved, and that not of our selves, it is the gift of God; we are saved from the sins and sufferings of the flesh, and are the redeemed of the Lord. THE CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS' PASTOR

True, I have made the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," the pastor for all the churches of the Christian Science denomination, but that does not make it impossible for this pastor of ours to preach! To my sense the Sermon on the Mount, read each Sunday without comment and obeyed throughout the week, would be enough for Christian practice. The Word of God is a powerful preacher, and it is not too spiritual to be practical, nor too transcendental to be heard and understood. Whosoever saith there is no sermon without personal preaching, forgets what Christian Scientists do not, namely, that God is a Person, and that he should be willing to hear a sermon from his personal God!

But, my brethren, the Scripture saith, "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." St. Paul complains of him whose god is his belly: to such a one our mode of worship may be intangible, for it is not felt with the fingers; but the spiritual sense drinks it in, and it corrects the material sense and heals the sinning and the sick. If St. John should tell that man that Jesus came neither eating nor drinking, and that he baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire, he would naturally reply, "That is too transcendental for me to believe, or for my worship. That is Johnism, and only Johnites would be seen in such company." But this is human: even the word Christian was anciently an opprobrium; -- hence the Scripture, "When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"

Though a man were begirt with the Urim and Thummim of priestly office, yet should not have charity, or should deny the validity and permanence of Christ's command to heal in all ages, he would dishonor that office and misinterpret evangelical religion. Divine Science is not an interpolation of the Scriptures, it is redolent with health, holiness, and love. It only needs the prism of divine Science, which scholastic theology has obscured, to divide the rays of Truth, and bring out the entire hues of God. The lens of Science magnifies the divine power to human sight; and we then see the allness of Spirit, therefore the nothingness of matter. NO REALITY IN EVIL OR SIN

Incorporeal evil embodies itself in the so-called corporeal, and thus is manifest in the flesh. Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it. The outcome of evil, called sin, is another nonentity that belittles itself until it annihilates its own embodiment: this is the only annihilation. The visible sin should be invisible: it ought not to be seen, felt, or acted: and because it ought not, we must know it is not, and that sin is a lie from the beginning, -- an illusion, nothing, and only an assumption that nothing is something. It is not well to maintain the position that sin is sin and can take possession of us and destroy us, but well that we take possession of sin with such a sense of its nullity as destroys it. Sin can have neither entity, verity, nor power thus regarded, and we verify Jesus' words, that evil, alias devil, sin, is a lie -- therefore is nothing and the father of nothingness. Christian Science lays the axe at the root of sin, and destroys it on the very basis of nothingness. When man makes something of sin it is either because he fears it or loves it. Now, destroy the conception of sin as something, a reality, and you destroy the fear and the love of it; and sin disappears. The man's fear, unconquered, conquers him, in whatever direction.

In Christian Science it is plain that God removes the punishment for sin only as the sin is removed -- never punishes it only as it is destroyed, and never afterwards; hence the hope of universal salvation. It is a sense of sin, and not a sinful soul, that is lost. Soul is immortal, but sin is mortal. To lose the sense of sin we must first detect the claim of sin; hold it invalid, give it the lie, and then we get the victory, sin disappears, and its unreality is proven. So long as we indulge the presence or believe in the power of sin, it sticks to us and has power over us. Again: To assume there is no reality in sin, and yet commit sin, is sin itself, that clings fast to iniquity. The Publican's wail won his humble desire, while the Pharisee's self-righteousness crucified Jesus.

Do Christian Scientists believe that evil exists? We answer, Yes and No! Yes, inasmuch as we do know that evil, as a false claim, false entity, and utter falsity, does exist in thought; and No, as something that enjoys, suffers, or is real. Our only departure from ecclesiasticism on this subject is, that our faith takes hold of the fact that evil cannot be made so real as to frighten us and so master us, or to make us love it and so hinder our way to holiness. We regard evil as a lie, an illusion, therefore as unreal as a mirage that misleads the traveller on his way home.

It is self-evident that error is not Truth; then it follows that it is untrue; and if untrue, unreal; and if unreal, to conceive of error as either right or real is sin in itself. To be delivered from believing in what is unreal, from fearing it, following it, or loving it, one must watch and pray that he enter not into temptation -- even as one guards his door against the approach of thieves. Wrong is thought before it is acted; you must control it in the first instance, or it will control you in the second. To overcome all wrong, it must become unreal to us: and it is good to know that wrong has no divine authority; therefore man is its master. I rejoice in the scientific apprehension of this grand verity.

The evil-doer receives no encouragement from my declaration that evil is unreal, when I declare that he must awake from his belief in this awful unreality, repent and forsake it, in order to understand and demonstrate its unreality. Error uncondemned is not nullified. We must condemn the claim of error in every phase in order to prove it false, therefore unreal.

The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen sin, disease, and death, and he overcomes them through Christ, Truth, teaching him that they cannot overcome us. The resistance to Christian Science weakens in proportion as one understands it and demonstrates the Science of Christianity.

A sinner ought not to be at ease, or he would never quit sinning. The most deplorable sight is to contemplate the infinite blessings that divine Love bestows on mortals, and their ingratitude and hate, filling up the measure of wickedness against all light. I can conceive of little short of the old orthodox hell to waken such a one from his deluded sense; for all sin is a deluded sense, and dis-ease in sin is better than ease. Some mortals may even need to hear the following thunderbolt of Jonathan Edwards: --

"It is nothing but God's mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking His pure eyes by your sinful, wicked manner of attending His solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not at this moment drop down into hell, but that God's hand has held you up." FUTURE PUNISHMENT OF SIN

My views of a future and eternal punishment take in a poignant present sense of sin and its suffering, punishing itself here and hereafter till the sin is destroyed. St. John's types of sin scarcely equal the modern nondescripts, whereby the demon of this world, its lusts, falsities, envy, and hate, supply sacrilegious gossip with the verbiage of hades. But hatred gone mad becomes imbecile -- outdoes itself and commits suicide. Then let the dead bury its dead, and surviving defamers share our pity.

In the Greek devil is named serpent -- liar -- the god of this world; and St. Paul defines this world's god as dishonesty, craftiness, handling the word of God deceitfully. The original text defines devil as accuser, calumniator; therefore, according to Holy Writ these qualities are objectionable, and ought not to proceed from the individual, the pulpit, or the press. The Scriptures once refer to an evil spirit as dumb, but in its origin evil was loquacious, and was supposed to outtalk Truth and to carry a most vital point. Alas! if now it is permitted license, under sanction of the gown, to handle with garrulity age and Christianity! Shall it be said of this century that its greatest discoverer is a woman to whom men go to mock, and go away to pray? Shall the hope for our race commence with one truth told and one hundred falsehoods told about it?

The present self-inflicted sufferings of mortals from sin, disease, and death should suffice so to awaken the sufferer from the mortal sense of sin and mind in matter as to cause him to return to the Father's house penitent and saved; yea, quickly to return to divine Love, the author and finisher of our faith, who so loves even the repentant prodigal -- departed from his better self and struggling to return -- as to meet the sad sinner on his way and to welcome him home.