Article September 18, 1978 Issue

Man is forever intact

ROBERT SIMON MARCUS

Man's true selfhood as the son of God is forever intact. This heartening fact derives from the very nature of true substance, the substance of God's being. In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes, "Substance is that which is eternal and incapable of discord and decay." And further on she adds, "The spiritual universe, including individual man, is a compound idea, reflecting the divine substance of Spirit."^{Science and Health, p. 468;}

Man, whose identity and individuality are formed and created by Spirit, must perpetually experience inalienable good. His substance is necessarily inviolable and unerodible. Because there is no outside to God's kingdom and no imperfection within, man and all the right ideas that constitute his being are wholly exempt from opposition or loss.

The realization of man's spiritual preexistence with God, a spiritual relationship unbroken by the illusion of mortality, gives us a scientific basis from which to nullify the world's belief in deprival and destruction. If man's relationship with his divine Principle—that is, God—were truly dependent upon the physical universe, or if Spirit's creation and materiality were interrelated systems of existence, there would be no recourse beyond the ravaging evidence of the mortal senses. But because man's being as idea has existed forever apart from the temporal realm, the genuine status of each of us is perfection, and we can begin to prove it through Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy declares, "Mortals will lose their sense of mortality—disease, sickness, sin, and death—in the proportion that they gain the sense of man's spiritual preexistence as God's child; as the offspring of good, and not of God's opposite,—evil, or a fallen man."^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 181;}