Article March 9, 1918 Issue

Notwithstanding the fact that the Scriptures declare in...

"Correct View of Man"— The Christian Science Monitor

Notwithstanding the fact that the Scriptures declare in the first chapter, and reiterate through their pages, that man is the image and likeness of God, this view of man is the one most remote from common acceptance. Rather have men inclined to the view, proposed in the myth of the serpent, that men "shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." This false view of man' hides the harmony of real being in which spiritual man can have no knowledge of what God does not know. The false estimate of man as a combination of good and evil must therefore be a survey of something outside of the infinite All; and this is an evident absurdity. So the material view of man resolves into nothing more substantial than a supposititious illusion, and from this illusion arise all the ills which afflict material man.

When a mistake is seen as a mistake, it is easy enough to understand that it can be corrected only by the opposite fact. When it is admitted that the material view of man is an entirely false one, the correct view is naturally sought in the spiritual fact, and this carries one back to the original and scientific statement that man is the image and likeness of God. As this spiritual verity dawns upon human consciousness, the false view begins to disappear and the facts concerning immortal man to appear as the only reality. "We look not at the things which are seen," Paul confidently declared, "but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." In the same way, Christian Science reverses the effort to find life and harmony in matter, leads thought away from the mortal to the immortal, and gives to a man such a view of Principle and its idea that he is enabled at once to begin the demonstration of its rule and to prove that harmony exists where once inharmony seemed to be.

The material and unreal beliefs of the human mind, and their outward manifestations of discord, disappear in just the proportion that a man adheres to the true view of the real, ideal man, made in the image of God. It is evident that if a man habitually confines his views of life to the testimony of physical perception, he cannot see the spiritual realities which are just at hand, for they are discerned only through spiritual sense. As more correct views of God and man are gained, consciousness becomes aware of spiritual harmonies never dreamed of before. "As mortals give up the delusion that there is more than one Mind, more than one God," Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 191), "man in God's likeness will appear, and this eternal man will include in that likeness no material element."

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