Article August 25, 1923 Issue

Christian Science draws a very clear line of distinction...

Charles W. J. Tennant,

Torquay Directory

Christian Science draws a very clear line of distinction between the mortal and the immortal. The mortal is finite, temporal, and material. The immortal is infinite, eternal, and spiritual. Man made in the image and likeness of God is the latter, and is referred to on page 475 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, where it is written: "Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom to sin. A mortal sinner is not God's man." Our critic has not understood the distinction drawn by Christian Science between the human Jesus and the spiritual Christ. Jesus was human; Christ was divine. Jesus was born of a human parent; Christ is eternal and existed as the Son of God "before the world was." Jesus was the physical personality which seemed to suffer and die; Christ is the spiritual selfhood which never died and enabled the physical Jesus to rise from the tomb. The human Jesus disappeared at the ascension; the Christ, the spiritual idea, remains with us, even as Christ Jesus said, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." It is the spiritual idea or Christ that appears to the receptive human consciousness and reveals the truth of Christian Science. The false claim that evil exists as reality has to be met and mastered by the spiritual understanding of the true nature of God and the universe, including man. We must gain the Mind of Christ in order to understand things as Jesus did. He never for a moment believed in the reality of evil. He understood it to be a temporal falsity, and destroyed its seeming manifestation, whether expressed as sin, disease, or death, instantaneously. Naturally, for us to follow his example and overcome the belief of evil we must know what he knew, and the study of Christian Science enables one to gain this knowledge.

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