This assertion about being flatly contradicts the way things seem to us as human beings. Yet the oneness and wholeness of being is the truth mankind needs.

"God is like Himself and like nothing else," Mary Baker Eddy notes. "He is universal and primitive. His character admits of no degrees of comparison. God is not part, but the whole." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 102;} This basic statement of the nature of God, understood, has enormous and practical ramifications for each of us.

God is Mind. It's commonly accepted that there are as many minds as there are people. But as there is one God there is but one Mind. Mind is the unbroken cause and source of everything that has true being. To human reasoning, this is a revolutionary and radical concept—we seem so accustomed to thinking of our-selves as having an independent consciousness that exists in a material body that in turn lives in some tiny corner of an immense universe.

Mankind reasons in terms of "many," not from the reality of spiritual oneness. Human speculation would divide Mind into consciousnesses and multiply the product into thousands of millions of minds—minds with a recollection of a material past, a conviction of a material present, and an anticipation of a material future. In Science, there always has been, and forever will be, only one Mind, made evident in the eternal completeness of man and universe.

God is Life. There are not really as many lives as there are people. Life is indivisible, not an element of being but the whole. To divisive mortal sense, it looks as though there is a myriad of lives, intertwined, converging and diverging, each taking its own course. But Life is one and All. Man lives the life that is the outcome of Life's oneness and infiniteness.

Sometimes people wish they could live another life, having made a mess of their present one. The life that can be messed up is the life that is of human origin. We can exchange that erring sense of life for the immaculate life that flows from the All-Life, from God.

We can live (and in reality are living) the life that is the emanation of the only Life, God. Mortal thought would split Life into lives, would mortalize those lives, separate them from the one Life, and alienate those lives from one another. This false view wrecks brotherhood. But the Science of Life gives the basis on which unity can be restored.

Suppose we are bringing Christian Science to bear on an estrangement of some kind. We can know that God is Soul, and Soul is one. Soul is never fractionated into souls or persons. Soul manifests itself in wholeness, not in pieces. Mortal thought induces a shattered sense of being. It would slice infinite Soul into millions of bits, and face us then with the task of trying to put them back together again.

Our aim is not to try to reunite mortal beings but to discard the false sense of resented or resentful mortal beings— to acknowledge the oneness and wholeness of being. This heals. Mrs. Eddy gives us this marvelous exposure of the workings of mortal reason: "We run into error when we divide Soul into souls, multiply Mind into minds and suppose error to be mind, then mind to be in matter and matter to be a lawgiver, unintelligence to act like intelligence, and mortality to be the matrix of immortality." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 249- 250;} We run out of error, in a manner of talking, when we affirm the indivisibility of Soul.

God is Spirit, and Spirit (being All) is the only substance. The world that appears to our senses would suggest that Spirit, which alone is substance, can be divided—that the one substance can be broken down into substances: into chemicals acting and reacting, into poisons, into the stuff that makes up the physical environment. Consequently, things wear out. But in Science the substance of Spirit is never injurious or liable to corrosion or wear. In the wholeness and oneness of substance there can be neither a shortage of substances nor an oversupply of substances. Disease has no substance; and substance is not diseased. Sickness can be healed on this basis.

God is Principle, the origin of all law. Principle, the whole and not merely a part of being, does not express itself in a multiplicity of mortal laws, complicated, contradictory, constrictive. There are, in divine Science, no laws to curtail true freedom; no frightening medical laws; no unjust laws. God is one Truth and one Love, not many. Truth is never split up into mortal truths, theories, or teachings, abrasively in contact, controversial, corruptive. Love is single, never debased into erratic personal sentimentality, always incapable of turning into hate.

Christ Jesus recognized, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation." ^{Matt. 12:25.} Real being includes no divisive elements. And real being is all. That which would divide Soul into persons and then make sick persons, that which would break down Mind into minds and make sick minds, is brought to desolation as we understand and prove the Science of all being.

Geoffrey J. Barratt