Article March 1, 1952 Issue

MAN UNCONDEMNED, FREE

MARGOT G. LETTS

The Science which she discovered, Mary Baker Eddy has given to the world in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." There, on page 282, she compares true being and its opposite, the material sense of life, to two geometrical symbols, a circle, or sphere, and a straight line. She pictures the infinite, which has neither a starting point nor an end, as a circle and the finite, or that which has both beginning and ending, as a straight line. Here are Mrs. Eddy's words: "The sphere represents good, the self-existent and eternal individuality or Mind; the straight line represents evil, a belief in a self-made and temporary material existence. Eternal Mind and temporary material existence never unite in figure or in fact."

An earnest perusal of this entire page helps one better to understand man, who is under God's law of freedom and continuity and not under mortal mind's false law of condemnation, which claims that even before a human birth takes place that particular human is, by universal consent, condemned by the so-called laws of chance or fatality. Thus mortal mind would pursue its own line of destruction, placing each mortal under the condemnation of its self-made erroneous laws of heredity, horoscope, accident, contagion, and fear, which eventually claim to fulfill a death sentence planned from the very outset. In Christian Science, condemnation, having its source, as well as its entire line of pursuance, in mortal mind, is understood to be godless, therefore wholly unreal. This Science reveals the glorious fact that man is the image and likeness of the one creative Mind, God, without whom "was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). Since there is but one creator, the likeness of God is the only man there is. Any secondary, so-called creation, springing from dust or born of the flesh, must be understood to be but a myth.

"There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit" (Rom. 8:1). Here, with God-given authority, the Apostle Paul makes clear that there is no condemnation of him who, eschewing the belief in a "self-made and temporary material existence," walks with God, knowing himself and all being as one with "self-existent and eternal individuality or Mind." Because of the allness of Mind, Spirit, Christian Scientists accept the logical conclusion that flesh and its concomitant, sin, have no origin, therefore no abiding place in the real. Referring to his own experience, the apostle testifies that "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" has freed him "from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2). Man, free by reason of his inseparability from Spirit, has never been condemned. Radiant in goodness, man in God's likeness rejoices in his unimpeachable freedom.

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