Article March 16, 1974 Issue

An Idea Cannot Be Sick

EYNON L. BROWN

The thought came to me with sudden clarity at a time when I was faced with a physical problem. In Christian Science we often hear of instantaneous healings. This thought that an idea cannot be sick was instantaneous, and so were the results. I was well at once.

Perhaps one unfamiliar with Christian Science might say, "So what? I'm a man, not an idea. I'm flesh and blood and bone, and I'm prone to baldness, hunger, poor eyesight, and so forth." But Christian Science, in accord with the Bible, says otherwise: Man is the image of God, divine Mind. Man is spiritual. He is idea. He is not made up of matter. Created in God's likeness, man does God's will. Nothing unlike God's image is or can be God's man. Further, the flesh and blood and bone constituting the material, mortal man are not the likeness of God but only false concepts, errors of mortal mind, or beliefs of life in matter. They have no place in the truth of being.

The biblical authority for these statements—the truth of which everyone can prove in a degree—is set forth early in the book of Genesis, and is one of the cardinal points in understanding that man is a spiritual idea: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."^{Gen. 1:27;} In Science and Health, speaking of Mind's idea, Mrs. Eddy quotes part of Webster's definition of "idea": "an image in Mind."^{Science and Health, p. 115;} And adopting the Bible definition of God as Love, she says elsewhere in the same book, "Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique."^{ibid., p. 475.}