Immune to Contagion?

SARA VELTMAN TUCKER

The Bible presents two opposite views of creation. The first is the spiritual, in which man is declared to be made in the image of God, Spirit. The second is a material view—man is said to have been made of the dust of the ground and the breath of life to have been breathed into his nostrils.

Christian Science accepts the first of these views of creation as the truth and explains the second as a false concept, a counterfeit of the true. It insists that the second concept is a myth and that the one creation is wholly spiritual. On this basis scientific Christianity challenges every position of material medicine and its beliefs in contagious disease.

In the Christian Science textbook Mrs. Eddy writes, "Colds, coughs, and contagion are engendered solely by human theories."^{Science and Health, p. 220;} In the germ theory, for instance, germs are supposed to pass from one body to another by means of personal contact, or close association, afterward to produce infection in various parts of the human body. The assumption is that a minuscule form of matter, too small for the unaided eye to see, can take control of a body, produce certain symptoms, and develop an illness through various stages.