Article February 12, 1955 Issue

MAN OR MORTAL?

PATRICIA HORTER

"Are you a man or a mouse?" is the interrogation sometimes jestingly used when courage is requisite to meet a certain situation. However, this distinction is hardly an incentive to summon courage until closely analyzed. The question should be, Are you man or a mortal? These are distinct opposites; the first is real, infinite, eternal, indestructible; the second, nothingness. They should never be confused, for they are in no way related.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 478, 479), "Mortal man is really a self-contradictory phrase, for man is not mortal, 'neither indeed can be;' man is immortal." One cannot be both immortal man, the man of God's creating, and a mortal man, the believer in self-created matter. If affirming that the latter is real, one is believing in a power opposed to God, thus opening the door of consciousness to the error that would bind him with the chains of sickness and sin.

Examining the question, "Are you a man or a mouse?" we see that such admirable and true qualities as spiritual poise, assurance, intelligence should be attributed to man as the image and likeness of God. The false or unreal qualities, such as fear, discouragement, dispiritedness, timidity, uneasiness, and a sense of inferiority, belong to the so-called mortal—or mouse—who can claim no reality and is a counterfeit of God's man. When one realizes man's true identity as at one with the Father, it is apparent that he cannot think of himself as a shy, fearful, self-conscious mortal, but must acknowledge the God-given qualities that are naturally his.

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