Article October 21, 1916 Issue

In a recent communication the continued suggestion is made...

Carl E. Herring

Kearney (Neb.) Times

In a recent communication the continued suggestion is made that the "Bible, true science, and reason affirm the fact that man created out of dust reflects the likeness of God." Later in the same article it is stated that "the likeness does not consist in similarity of the material of which their persons are constructed, but in the intellectual and moral qualities, reason, judgment, and conscience." These two assertions are brought close together because the purpose of the communication was to deny the Christian Science teaching that God is Spirit and man as the reflection of God must be spiritual and not material; and yet these two statements show how impossible it is for a well-balanced mind even to write a short article of denial without ultimately basing the relationship between God and man on qualitative value.

While there is no particular objection to the words "intellectual," "moral," "reason," "judgment," "conscience," used by your correspondent in his efforts to describe God, yet they too much partake of the human thought about man and are suggestive of the age-long tendency to bring God down to the level of man instead of lifting man to God. In other words, the mixture of a dust man with human reason and passions has constituted our basic conception of God, which we have enlarged and amplified to suit our own ideas or for a God of special prowess to meet an emergency.

Christian Science undertakes to define God on an absolute basis and meet the demands of Scripture,—"with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." Thus in answer to the question "What is God?" Mrs. Eddy gives the following brief definition: "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love" (Science and Health, p. 465). With this conception of God in mind we are prepared to take up the study of man, and our first lesson may properly be found in the first chapter of Genesis: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

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