Article December 4, 1948 Issue

"THE TRUE STATUS OF MAN"

CAROLINE B. WINGERT

If it were not true that man is now the immortal idea of God, hence spiritually whole, all the striving mankind could do would not make this so. Man has no choice but to be what he divinely is, God's idea, the embodiment of good and good alone. Can the ray of the sun be unlike the sun? Has the sun's ray a choice of reflecting light or darkness? Certainly not, and neither can man's immortal status be other than wholly Godlike, spiritual, here and now.

Mary Baker Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 475), "Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death." God, of course, never sins, sickens, or dies. How then, could man, the expression of God, sin, sicken, or die? Indeed he could not and does not.

Instead, then, of thinking of ourselves as mortals, separated from God and laboriously trying to become Godlike, is not the straight and narrow way to see that man, the very expression of God's being, is incapable of experiencing anything which is not first a fact about God? Man is not a mortal in the process of becoming an immortal; nor are there two kinds of man, a mortal and an immortal. There are not two gods, for God is One, infinite Spirit, the immortal Father of us all. This being true, man, created in the image and likeness of God, cannot partake of duality, that is, be both material and spiritual, mortal and immortal. The terms "mortal" and "immortal" are merely two different concepts. But the light of Truth, as revealed in Christian Science, displaces a dual sense of being, a sense which has kept humanity in the pitiful bondage of limitation, and eliminates the false concept.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

"IF I BE LIFTED UP"