Article April 25, 1970 Issue

Everybody's Perfect

ELIZABETH BICE LUERSSEN

A billboard ad showing a car with a flat tire bore the plaintive caption "Nobody's perfect." The writer's first reaction was to smile in amusement. Then she found herself challenging the platitude with some of the truths she had learned in Christian Science about the perfect creator, the one Spirit, and man's incorruptible spiritual identity in His likeness. Soon she had mentally reworded the billboard caption to read, "God's perfect. Man's perfect. Everybody's really perfect!"

The actual perfection of man as the image or reflection of God, whatever the senses may say, is brought out in the first chapter of Genesis and was the basis on which Christ Jesus healed. Mrs. Eddy writes: "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." Science and Health, pp. 476, 477;

Christian Science emphasizes the importance of beginning and staying with the premise of spiritual perfection in order to bring out harmony. But why does this seem so difficult to do? Why can't we always maintain the correct view of man as perfect—the viewpoint of healing? Possibly because we are too busy looking at mortal, material man with all his faults. We are dwelling on corporeal personality instead of divine reality, on mortal seeming instead of immortal being. Like the ancients who declared the earth to be flat, we are drawing our conclusions from the evidence of the delusive senses. We are going by what seems to be but is not actually so.

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The Age of Aquarius
April 25, 1970
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