However human beliefs may claim to develop an individual, the fact is that God alone characterizes man. Nothing can erase the consciousness which God bestows upon His sons. The Father's characterization is permanent, forever present, always ready to be brought to light. This Christian Science accomplishes, for one of the grand functions of scientific Christianity is to demonstrate true consciousness, which expresses nothing but the present spirituality. This proof of real selfhood destroys the belief of a mortal selfhood, or consciousness, which bases its thinking on matter and is consequently materialistic in nature—corporeal, given to self interest and the tendency to sin and sickness.

Through Science one can redeem himself from evil traits and unpleasant experiences imposed upon him by false consciousness. Identifying himself as the image or idea of divine Mind by expressing the divine character and exercising the faculties of Mind, he speeds the full revelation of the man he really is.

Mary Baker Eddy discusses mankind's advancement on page 76 of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," showing that the individual who has progressed beyond matter cannot return to it. She says, "Neither will man seem to be corporeal, but he will be an individual consciousness, characterized by the divine Spirit as idea, not matter."

Spirit is divine Mind, and Mind's creation must necessarily be made up of ideas. To exist, an idea must be known, and an idea must express the nature of the Mind knowing it. Human concepts come and go. They betray our inmost weaknesses or exhibit our struggling strengths. We conceive them, and then we often forget them. But whatever divine Mind conceives, it never forgets. One cannot escape the eternal fact that his real self is divinity's idea and that this characterization of himself can never change to a mortal misconception. Whatever absurdity the carnal mind may present in the guise of man must be seen as a flimsy, temporal delusion and not the truth of anyone.

Man is an individual consciousness only because he is a conscious idea. His consciousness is not a mind, but is the reflection of its source, divine Mind; and it embodies the character and faculties of Mind. Real consciousness cannot separate itself from the Mind it reflects and wander into the shadowy region of mortal existence, in which sin and sickness, blindness and deafness, sadness and danger, claim to lurk. A divine idea cannot deteriorate, become decrepit, or succumb to mortality. Mind's idea dwells in the light of Truth eternally and is conscious only of purity and perfection, vigor, joy, and security.

Healings in Christian Science are brought about by a fundamental change of consciousness. The patient gives up in some measure the consciousness of matter and its ills for the consciousness of God and His harmonies. Then health appears because it is a quality of real consciousness.

Mrs. Eddy says of the healing method of Christ Jesus (Unity of Good, p. 11), "He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this change through the higher laws of God." When material consciousness is understood as false and its existence is denied, this dispels the sensations that constitute one's material problem, and the individual consciousness which is Mind's idea becomes evident.

Too often the student of Christian Science is concerned with ridding himself of unpleasant sensations and situations without going to the basis of his problems by proving the utter unreality of the consciousness which produces matter. The more mature Scientist identifies himself clearly as "an individual consciousness, characterized by the divine Spirit as idea, not matter," and in the measure of the sincerity of his desire to be that idea, false consciousness is subdued and eliminated. This latter method of working calls for an idealism that reaches beyond what one may wish to be and have, humanly, and glimpses a selfhood which is intact in Mind and wholly characterized by its Maker.

Jesus must have had in mind this change of consciousness from the material to the spiritual when he set the standard for Christians with this counsel (Matt. 5:48): "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Perfection does not appear at once to human thought, but it is always the basis of the Christian Scientist's prayerful metaphysical efforts. As real consciousness appears gradually, the harmony and abundance and sinlessness that characterize it appear with it, and the human sense of life is transformed.

Paul saw this when he wrote to his friends in Corinth: "We know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away" (I Cor. 13: 9, 10). A modern translation has it, "We only know bit by bit, and we only prophesy bit by bit; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will be superseded."

A divine idea is not an abstraction. It is a present, living reality, vibrant with life and intelligence, purity and dominion. We can and must claim the energizing qualities that belong to Mind's idea and demonstrate them as our true heritage. Then we shall know ourselves as the man the Father characterizes as His idea, and this idea will continue to unfold the blessings which only divinity can bestow.

Helen Wood Bauman