Traditionally—and quite understandably—two subjects have generally concerned the best thinkers: God and man.

What we think of God and man has concrete significance.

God is Spirit. Man is Spirit's spiritual idea. These are distinct in nature and quality but not separate, according to demonstrable Christian Science. Wherever God exists—and, being infinite, He exists everywhere—man exists. And wherever man exists, there is God. Neither God nor man can be considered in isolation from each other. To speak of cause is, by implication, to speak of effect. Whatever we say about God has significance for man. And we can say nothing comprehensive about man without reference to God.

Man is the infinite expression of infinite Principle, the only origin of being. Cause and effect, Deity and the spiritual universe, cannot be divided. They coexist through all space and all time. But what about human beings? What about physical man?

The flesh-man is the inverted concept of the real man everywhere and always present where the mortal entity seems to be. God is primal cause; man is God's immortal effect. This is the irrefutable logic of divine Science. Any sense of man that does not have traceable roots to God is a false concept of man. Spirit and matter are opposites and cannot coexist. Hence man cannot be material.

These underlying truths of being have practical consequences, as every Christian Science healing attests. This healing is based on the perfect coexistence of God and man. We read of God in Deuteronomy, "He is the Rock, his work is perfect." ^{Deut. 32:4;} The Christian Science healer does not pray to heal and correct an imperfect physical system but to recognize God's perfect idea in place of the troubled mortal. The lessening of belief that man is mortal initiates the healing. The spiritual realization of man as divine idea concludes the healing.

Understanding the coexistence of God and His idea, we would no more try to heal man than we would try to heal God. Christian Science shows us how to deny the claim that man is faulty, and to affirm the flawlessness of man as God's coexistent idea.

To get a clearer sense of God is at the same time to gain a sharper view of man. It's to get a deeper conviction of man's completeness. We could no more add something to God's whole man than we could add something to self-existent God. And since nothing can be taken away from God, nothing can be subtracted from man. Nothing needs to be. Claims of disease and lack never had a place in God or man and—scientifically speaking—do not have to be removed from either.

Mortal thought may claim these absolute facts are irrelevant to human experience. On the contrary, they are dynamically applicable to discordant conditions of whatever variety. That which human thought defines as some objective discord—a diseased organ, say, or a polluted environment—is at heart a mortal misconception of God and His coexistent spiritual creation. To try to correct such troubles on other than a metaphysical basis is to have only limited success. Strictly speaking, it is to have no success at all. At best, we only rearrange the misconception. The comprehension of spiritual being eliminates misconception. Human sense enjoys this elimination as spiritual healing.

"Throughout the infinite cycles of eternal existence, Spirit and matter neither concur in man nor in the universe," ^{Science and Health, p. 319;} Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Matter is the objective expression of mortal mind. In a manner of speaking, mortal mind and matter coexist. They are supposititious strata of what is actually nonbeing. To deny mortal mind place and reality is at the same time to deny matter place and reality. And exactly the same can be said of denials of matter.

Suppose a friend has asked us to give him Christian Science treatment for illness. It's of first importance in doing so to realize that the disease, no matter what medical term or physical description may be given to it, never came into being. It is not our job to expunge it from being. Only that which coexists with infinite God, good, has any being anywhere. Disease, as a discordant state of thought, and not a physical condition, cannot coexist with man. It cannot, because man coexists with God. And this means that our apparently sick friend, in his real selfhood, has never actually been attacked by disease.

In reasoning from a spiritual basis in relation to any case of sickness, it's effective to know that man does not live in an undivine, fleshly framework, but lives in Spirit. Perfect Spirit is present, expressing itself through perfect man exactly where we think we see a physical person. In the measure that we base our thought and life on this spiritual fact, we will heal sickness and overcome other limitations. That's the divine law.

Here is the nub of the matter: "Immortal man was and is God's image or idea," Mrs. Eddy says, "even the infinite expression of infinite Mind, and immortal man is coexistent and coeternal with that Mind." ^{ibid., p. 336.}

Geoffrey J. Barratt