"Truth is immortal; error is mortal"
About this Quote
“Truth is immortal; error is mortal” lands with the clean, hard click of a courtroom gavel. Mary Baker Eddy isn’t offering a comforting platitude so much as a theological physics: truth has permanence because it’s anchored in God; “error” is temporary because it has no real source, only the illusion of one. The sentence works by making a metaphysical claim sound like common sense. Immortal/mortal is a binary that bypasses debate. If you accept the terms, the conclusion is already locked in.
The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Eddy is not merely praising truth; she’s delegitimizing competing accounts of reality by recoding them as “error” - not alternative interpretations, not honest disagreement, but a doomed category destined to die off. That framing matters in the late 19th-century American religious marketplace, where new movements were battling for authority amid rapid modernization, scientific prestige, and anxieties about the body and illness. Eddy’s Christian Science insisted that ultimate reality is spiritual, not material; sickness, sin, even death could be understood as errors of belief rather than final facts. Calling error “mortal” isn’t only moral judgment; it’s a promise of expiration, a way to treat fear and pain as temporary artifacts rather than defining conditions.
Rhetorically, the line is built for repetition: two clauses, mirrored structure, a stark moral geometry. It comforts by shrinking chaos into a solvable problem (identify error, align with truth), while also asserting power. Truth doesn’t need defending, Eddy implies; it outlasts the argument.
The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Eddy is not merely praising truth; she’s delegitimizing competing accounts of reality by recoding them as “error” - not alternative interpretations, not honest disagreement, but a doomed category destined to die off. That framing matters in the late 19th-century American religious marketplace, where new movements were battling for authority amid rapid modernization, scientific prestige, and anxieties about the body and illness. Eddy’s Christian Science insisted that ultimate reality is spiritual, not material; sickness, sin, even death could be understood as errors of belief rather than final facts. Calling error “mortal” isn’t only moral judgment; it’s a promise of expiration, a way to treat fear and pain as temporary artifacts rather than defining conditions.
Rhetorically, the line is built for repetition: two clauses, mirrored structure, a stark moral geometry. It comforts by shrinking chaos into a solvable problem (identify error, align with truth), while also asserting power. Truth doesn’t need defending, Eddy implies; it outlasts the argument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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