Article November 16, 1918 Issue

The scientific or spiritual understanding of man is...

The Christian Science Monitor

The scientific or spiritual understanding of man is equally as important as the spiritual understanding of God. The true understanding of the one cannot be gained without including an understanding of the other. A man apprehends just as much of God as he is able to perceive of spiritual man, God's idea. He must begin, indeed, with the idea to understand its Principle, and he cannot understand God while he entertains a false conception of man, the idea. It is impossible, moreover, to heal the sick according to the absolutely scientific method while there remains any confusion of thought concerning the nature and status of man. "The true idea of man," Mary Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 337), "as the reflection of the invisible God, is as incomprehensible to the limited senses as is man's infinite Principle. The visible universe and material man are the poor counterfeits of the invisible universe and spiritual man. Eternal things (verities) are God's thoughts as they exist in the spiritual realm of the real. Temporal things are the thoughts of mortals and are the unreal, being the opposite of the real or the spiritual and eternal."

Now just as the real man's individuality and consciousness are the reflection of the invisible God, so the mortal or material man is an expression of a mythical carnal mind, which is nothing more than a lie about divine Mind. Every belief or condition embraced in this false mortal mind is unreal. Its incarnation in the flesh is, therefore, likewise unreal, and this explains the scientific statement that there is no matter. What mortal mind calls matter is the subjective condition of mortal mind, its own false sense of substance; and this applies to the human body as well as to any other form of matter. As all true ideas abide in Principle, or divine Mind, and are expressed spiritually, so mortal mind, in its fictitious imitation, holds within itself every condition of evil. This is expressed materially, and mortal mind calls its materiality matter.

It is apparent that the spiritual man is not in need of salvation. That is humanity's exclusive necessity. It should be equally apparent that salvation can only mean to mankind the coming out of the fiction of a material sense of life in matter into the true sense of being as Spirit and spiritual. This process Paul called the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new. Since material man is unreal, however, there is nothing to be put off as if it were something substantial to be laid aside somewhere. What takes place is that the human yearning for the divine has "brought life and immortality to light," to use Paul's phrase; and as spiritual reality becomes clearer, the illusion that had seemed real and substantial simply disappears.

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