Article October 30, 1926 Issue

If our critic will be satisfied with the "plain English" of...

Miss Madge Bell, Acting Committee on Publication for North Island, New Zealand,—Auckland

Star

If our critic will be satisfied with the "plain English" of the Bible, I can explain my statement that "sickness cannot touch the man God made, and sustains, in His own image and likeness, but belongs to mortal concepts of man," by reference to the first three chapters of Genesis. In Chapter I we learn that God (Elohim) made man in His own image and after His own likeness. This fact is then doubly emphasized; for we read, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." God being Spirit, perfect, and eternal, man must be spiritual, perfect, and eternal; and sin, sickness, and death have no more part in him than they have in God, of whom he is the image and likeness. We are told that "the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them;" also that God, in seeing "every thing that he had made," pronounced it "very good." Evil in any form has no place in this creation, of which John declared, "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." In the second chapter of Genesis we read an allegorical account of a creation that not only differs from, but also contradicts the former record. This account tells of Adam, formed "of the dust of the ground" and animated by the breath "breathed into his nostrils" by Jehovah, not Elohim. We are not told that this creation was "very good," nor that it was complete, as "an help meet" had to be supplied for Adam later on. In the first account man is free to eat of "every tree ... yielding seed," but in the second account Adam is expressly forbidden to eat of the fruit of the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil." Why? Does not the belief that evil is something that can be known and indulged in deny the omnipotence of God, infinite good?

In the third chapter we learn of a talking serpent who persuaded the woman, Eve, that the knowledge of good and evil would make them "as gods"—not, be it noted, as the image and likeness of the one God. Disobedience to Jehovah's command resulted eventually in death; and so we have the history of a mortal so-called man, subject to sin, sickness, and death. To this concept of a man who is mortal, or this "mortal concept" of man, evil in various forms belongs, and as long as we believe man is mortal, we shall accept these evils as part of our heritage. The remedy for these ills, as Christian Science points out, lies in the awakening from the false sense of life in matter through a knowledge of the absolute truth about God and the man He created in His own image and likeness. The Psalmist would seem to have seen this truth when he said, "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness."

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