Article June 19, 1909 Issue

THE PERFECTION OF MAN

HARRY FRANKLIN PORTER.

The teaching of Christian Science, that man is now and always has been perfect, has awakened the comment that man's salvation lies not in his present perfection, but in his perfectibility, and in answer we would ask if the all-wise and all-powerful creator, whom the prophet described as "of purer eyes than to behold evil," or as unable to conceive of an imperfect thing,—did this creator, the one God, good, deign to make man imperfect (unfinished), and leave the problem of his perfection to the chance of the ages? Could He make anything unlike Himself, not "in his image and likeness" (complete, perfect)? No, perfection is incapable of producing imperfection, just as harmony is incapable of producing discord.

As a spiritual idea in infinite Mind, man is necessarily perfect. A creator with infinite wisdom and power could not, and would not if He could, make any other but a perfect man. Our sense of man's perfection is, however, sadly awry; and it is to this erroneous sense of things that all the toil and trouble, discord, disease, death, in the world is and ever has been due. This, then, is the task for you and me, who would labor for the good of all mankind—to mend our sense of things, and in mending ours to help mend or transform human sense at large. Some one has well said, "The mother of sins is ignorance." Let us, then, make war on ignorance. Let us puncture the flimsy fables of fear and folly. Let us remove the blinds of Belial, the dark and dingy draperies of doubt and dread, and see "the form divinely fair." It is there,—aye, here, everywhere,—if we but look, if we but raise our eyes. Why cling to earth and error, lean to matter, to mud, for health and happiness, when heaven, harmony, the reign of ever-present and omnipotent Mind, divine Love, is everywhere, and there is no place where it is not?

If it is admitted that God, whom men profess to acknowledge and adore as the one Supreme Being, is everywhere, and there is no place where He is not; that "in him we live, and move, and have our being," and that His reign and rule is perfect harmony, then it must be conceded that man, the individual idea of God, is even now perfect, spiritual, complete; and it is for us, who from the force of habit, just because our ancestors so believed, continue to accept unchallenged the evidence of the material senses, which testify to discord, disease, and doom, to awaken! The earth is flat and the sun appears to move—to the senses; but the science of astronomy contradicts this false evidence, and we have long since learned to acquiesce, although our ecclesiastical ancestry suffered sore from qualms of "conscience" before they fell in line. Christian Science contradicts and corrects the false evidence of the material senses as to the nature of man, that "would put soul into soil, life into limbo, and doom all things to decay" (Science and Health, p. 318), and declares his present, positive, provable perfection. Why linger longer and lag behind, like bigotry of yore? why not fall into the line of light now?

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