Next to God there is no subject on which men need more enlightenment than man. Christian Science supplies this enlightenment. One thought-provoking statement by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, is (Pulpit and Press, p. 4), "Is not a man metaphysically and mathematically number one, a unit, and therefore whole number, governed and protected by his divine Principle, God?" A unit is defined as "a single thing... regarded as an undivided whole."

When we think of the mathematical number one, we think of it as a unit, a mathematical concept, complete and continuous, superior to physical force because it exists in a thought realm where physical force cannot enter. This unit has wholeness. It is not fractional or fragmentary. In the realm of mathematics, the unit one occupies a most essential place, fills that place, and expresses its activity all according to the mathematical laws that constitute and maintain it.

Individual man, as Mrs. Eddy points out, is a unit, number one, a whole number. His continuing completeness and wholeness is forever assured by the Principle that is his Life and substance. He is not related to the mortal misconception of man, which may present a semblance of being a unit, but is susceptible of breakage, incompleteness, partial impairment, disintegration, and death.

A mortal may have some important function of his being afflicted while the rest of him remains comparatively normal. His locomotion, respiration, digestion, seeing, or hearing may be upset, and yet the unafflicted portion goes on much as usual. Mortal mind argues that it makes mortals, and then afflicts them in their heads, hearts, legs, or hands, or some other part.

How helpful, then, to be able to reverse this falsity with the spiritual fact that man is, in truth, a unit of Mind for whose continuing wholeness and "unitness" Principle, God, is responsible. Man's entire being is permeated with the quality, character, health, and goodness of God. He cannot be thought of in parts, some healthy, some well. There are no parts to idea. Man's being is forever a unit. Whatever is cause to him is cause to all of him. God gives him action, seeing, hearing, all that goes to make up his unit nature, and God continues to be equally the cause and the preserver of every faculty, activity, and quality that is man's. A good cause cannot affect man in some part or parts, and an evil cause in other parts. His "unitness," as God's idea or reflection, it is God's function forever to preserve. And God does just this.

This is comforting. If error suggests that you are a mortal embodied in matter, and afflictable in one or several parts, organs, or functions, turn to the true idea that man is a unit of divine expression whose entireness and wholeness is ever superior to any phase of mortal belief. His spiritual "unitness" is his armor, which is invulnerable at every point. This unit is forever a whole unit, indivisible, spiritual, moral, healthful, holy in its entireness.

A unit cannot be a medley of contraries, cannot be sick in part and healthy in part, cannot be sinful one day and good the next; seeing but not hearing; digesting but not walking. Because his individuality is a unit, a unit of divine Life, he is a healthy, sinless, seeing, hearing, altogether harmoniously active unit. In no way at no time, can he be less than a whole number, expressing throughout his entirety the quality, character, and activity of God. Because man is a unit and whole number, his being forever expresses in his wholeness the health, action, perception, and holiness of the divine Principle he lives to manifest. Nothing less is man.

Jesus proved that man cannot be afflicted in part. The blind, the dumb, the deaf, the paralyzed, the epileptic, the leper, the cripple, the demented, were freed by him. He understood that man is a unit of divine expression, and that the forces of God are forever active in this unit to preserve its harmony and health, not in part, but as a whole.

Is not God as much responsible for the substance of man's action, seeing, hearing, speaking as He is for man's being? God manifests Himself in infinite ideas, all units of deific Life and Love. All are individual, yet all are united in one perfectly co-ordinated universe, the full expression of Mind.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 427) Mrs. Eddy says, "Man is the same after as before a bone is broken or the body guillotined." How can this be? Because man is spiritual, not material, a unit of Mind, a whole number, an idea, whose God-constituted and God-continued wholeness neither mortal mind nor physical forces can ever endanger or assail.

The Christian Scientist is learning to claim his true status as a unit, or whole number, in God's kingdom. He refuses to believe that his or his brother's individuality is a material, mortal personality afflictable in part, or as a whole. The true, or Christ-idea, of being shows him that man, as a unit of God, lives for and in God, unreachable by negative, ignorant, material forces, fearlessly expressing the wholeness and "unitness" that flows naturally from God's allness and oneness.

Paul Stark Seeley