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he think he is, but to know his error (1) is what ought to be his greatest study. For the last twenty-five years (2) I have been trying to find out what man is and at last have come to know what he is not. To know that you exist is nothing, but to know what disturbs you is of great value to every person. The world has been developing itself, and we look on and never think it is ourselves. Through ignorance of Wisdom we have made a man of straw and given him life, intellect and a head in the image of our own creation. To this image we have given the idea "man" with certain capacities such as life and death, and have made him subject to evils such as disease. To the man of straw the words I have quoted are applied. This man of straw has been trying to find himself out and in doing this has nearly destroyed or blotted out his real existence. So in looking for man I found it was like the old lady looking for her comb and finding it in her hair. I found I was the very idea I was looking for. Then I knew myself and found that what we call man is not man but a shadow of error.
(1) That is, his bondage to opinion, his mistaken view of his body, and its supposed tendencies to disease. (2) This was written in 1865,
Wisdom is the true man and error the counterfeit. When Wisdom governs matter all goes well, but when error directs all goes wrong. So I shall assume the old mode of calling man as he is called and. make myself a principle outside of man, just as man makes all "laws of God," as he calls them outside of himself. So man admits he is not with God or a part of Him. Therefore he belongs to this world and expects to die and go to his God. So he lives all his life in bondage through fear of death. Now, this keeps him sick and to avoid all these fears and troubles that disturb his mind and make him sick he invents all sorts of false ideas and never thinks they are the cause of his misery. He invents all sorts of disease to torment himself. Standing outside of these ideas I know that they are the works of man; that God or wisdom has never made anything to torment mankind. Error has created its own misery.
Having had twenty-five years of practice I have seen the working of this evil on mankind, how it has grown till it is increasing and at the present time there is more misery from disease than all other evils put together, and every effort to arrest this evil only makes it worse. Within the last seven
