Article August 27, 1949 Issue

SEEING THE PERFECT MAN

GEORGE W. LEDBETTER

Until Mary Baker Eddy discovered and founded Christian Science, the healings accomplished by Jesus were considered to be miracles. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy shows that Jesus' healing works were not miracles, but were based on a scientific divine Principle; and she set forth this Principle in her textbook so clearly that it may be understood by all. Hence, anyone who so desires may now follow Jesus' command to heal the sick. Our Leader writes on pages 476 and 477 of this textbook: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.

Jesus was able to see the perfect man where others saw a sick, sinning mortal because he understood the real man of God's creating. He knew that God creates man in His image and likeness and that therefore man is not mortal and material, but immortal and spiritual. Man as God's reflection cannot express anything which God does not express, so that man must express infinite Life, intelligence, and true substance. Jesus' clear understanding of the real man resulted in the sick being healed.

It is not reasonable to believe that Jesus could have seen sin, disease, and death as real, as belonging to man, and then proved these errors unreal by destroying them. For example, Jesus did not first see leprosy as the true condition of the man "full of leprosy," and then destroy it as unreal. No, he understood that the only true man is always perfect and does not live in the body, but in Spirit. When looking at the leper, he saw not the mortal man, which others were seeing, but the real man, and we read that he said, "Be thou clean," and "immediately the leprosy departed from him" (Luke 5:13). The perfect man appeared so clearly to Jesus that his declaration of the spiritual facts resulted in immediate and complete healing.

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