Hymns 396,201,29
I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
… And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven;
… and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
… And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony;
For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.
¶ Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:
But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.
But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?
He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.
Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.
I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.
From Genesis to the Apocalypse, sin, sickness, and death, envy, hatred, and revenge, — all evil, — are typiDoom of the dragonfied by a serpent, or animal subtlety. … The serpent is perpetually close upon the heel of harmony. From the beginning to the end, the serpent pursues with hatred the spiritual idea. In Genesis, this allegorical, talking serpent typifies mortal mind, “more subtle than any beast of the 565 field.” In the Apocalypse, when nearing its doom, this evil increases and becomes the great red dragon, swollen with sin, inflamed with war against spirituality, and ripe for destruction. It is full of lust and hate, loathing the brightness of divine glory.
Serpent (ophis, in Greek; nacash, in Hebrew). Subtlety; a lie; the opposite of Truth, named error; the first statement of mythology and idolatry; the belief in more than one God; animal magnetism;
Red Dragon. Error; fear; inflammation; sensuality; subtlety; animal magnetism;
As named in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is the specific term for error, or mortal mind. The genus of errorIt is the false belief that mind is in matter, and is both evil and good; that evil is as real as good and more powerful. This belief has not one quality of Truth.
Error is false, mortal belief; it is illusion, without spiritual identity or foundation, and it has no real existence. Error unveiledThe supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter, or of it, is an error.
Truth cannot be contaminated by error. The state288ment that Truth is real necessarily includes the correlated statement, that error, Truth’s unlikeness, is unreal.
The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spirThe great conflictitual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love.
Animal magnetism has no scientific foundation, for God governs all that is real, harmonious, and eternal, and Mere negationHis power is neither animal nor human. Its basis being a belief and this belief animal, in Science animal magnetism, mesmerism, or hypnotism is a mere negation, possessing neither intelligence, power, nor reality, and in sense it is an unreal concept of the so-called mortal mind.
Mortal belief (the material sense of life) and immortal Truth (the spiritual sense) are the tares and the wheat, which are not united by progress, but separated.
The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the imThe tares and wheatmutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness.
Spirit is God, Soul; therefore Soul is not in matter.
Everything good or worthy, God made. Whatever is valueless or baneful, He did not make, — hence its unreality. In the Science of Genesis we read that He saw everything which He had made, “and, behold, it was very good.” The corporeal senses declare otherwise; and if we give the same heed to the history of error as to the records of truth, the Scriptural record of sin and death favors the false conclusion of the material senses. Sin, sickness, and death must be deemed as devoid of reality as they are of good, God.
Whatever is governed by God, is never for an instant deprived of the light and might of intelligence and Life.
We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal Light and darknesssense of the absence of light, at the coming of which darkness loses the appearance of reality. So sin and sorrow, disease and death, are the suppositional absence of Life, God, and flee as phantoms of error before truth and love.
With its divine proof, Science reverses the evidence of material sense. Every quality and condition of mortality is lost, swallowed up in immortality.
Whence comes a talking, lying serpent to tempt the children of divine Love? The serpent enters into the Mythical serpentmetaphor only as evil. We have nothing in the animal kingdom which represents the species described, — a talking serpent, — and should rejoice that evil, by whatever figure presented, contradicts itself and has neither origin nor support in Truth and good. Seeing this, we should have faith to fight all claims of evil, because we know that they are worthless and unreal.
The forbidden fruit of knowledge, against which wisdom warns man, is the testimony of error, declaring existence to be at the mercy of death, and good and evil to be capable of commingling. This is the significance of the Scripture concerning this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” — this growth of material belief, of which it is said: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Human hypotheses first assume the reality of sickness, sin, and death, and then assume the necessity of these evils because of their admitted actuality. These human verdicts are the procurers of all discord.
Mortal mind, acting from the basis of sensation in matter, is animal magnetism; but this so-called mind, Animal magnetism destroyedfrom which comes all evil, contradicts itself, and must finally yield to the eternal Truth, or the divine Mind, expressed in Science. In proportion to our understanding of Christian Science, we are freed from the belief of heredity, of mind in matter or animal magnetism; and we disarm sin of its imaginary power in proportion to our spiritual understanding of the status of immortal being.
The testimony of the serpent is significant of the illusion of error, of the false claims that misrepresent God, good.
An apostle says that the Son of God [Christ] came to Diabolism destroyed“destroy the works of the devil.” We should follow our divine Exemplar, and seek the destruction of all evil works, error and disease included.
From first to last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have resulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus’ demonstrations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil.
Jesus strips all disguise from error, when his teachings are fully understood. By parable and argument he exProof from miraclesplains the impossibility of good producing evil; and he also scientifically demonstrates this great fact, proving by what are wrongly called miracles, that sin, sickness, and death are beliefs — illusive errors — which he could and did destroy.
The only civil sentence which he had for error was, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Still stronger evidence that Jesus’ reproof was pointed and pungent is found in his own words, — showing the necessity for such forcible utterance, when he cast out devils and healed the sick and sinning. The relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims.
That false claim — that ancient belief, that old serpent whose name is devil (evil), claiming that there is intelliDragon cast down to earthgence in matter either to benefit or to injure men — is pure delusion, the red dragon; and it is cast out by Christ, Truth, the spiritual idea, and so proved to be powerless.
If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of God, or Truth, and doubts the suAll evil unnaturalpremacy of good, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil and doubt them, and no longer think it natural to love sin and unnatural to forsake it, — no longer imagine evil to be ever-present and good absent? Truth should 131 not seem so surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem so real as truth.
The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death; and he will overcome them by understanding their nothingness and the allness of God, or good.
He who has Abiding in Lifethe true idea of good loses all sense of evil, and by reason of this is being ushered into the undying realities of Spirit. Such a one abideth in Life, — life obtained not of the body incapable of supporting life, but of Truth, unfolding its own immortal idea. Jesus gave the true idea of being, which results in infinite blessings to mortals.
When the illusion of sickness or sin tempts you, cling steadfastly to God and His idea. Allow nothing but His Steadfast and calm trust likeness to abide in your thought. Let neither fear nor doubt overshadow your clear sense and calm trust, that the recognition of life harmonious — as Life eternally is — can destroy any painful sense of, or belief in, that which Life is not. Let Christian Science, instead of corporeal sense, support your understanding of being, and this understanding will supplant error with Truth, replace mortality with immortality, and silence discord with harmony.
Our proportionate admission of the claims of good or of evil determines the harmony of our existence, — our health, our longevity, and our Christianity.
Evil is destroyed by the sense of good.
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