Article November 1, 2013

Lusting against lust

Frederick Dixon

Originally published in the June 15, 1918 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

Generic man, in Christian Science, is the full image and likeness of God, divine Mind, and is reflected in an infinity of greater and lesser ideas and their identities, the sum total of which combine to make up the infinite spiritual idea or generic man. It is thus that Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 258of Science and Health: “Through spiritual sense you can discern the heart of divinity, and thus begin to comprehend in Science the generic term man. Man is not absorbed in Deity, and man cannot lose his individuality, for he reflects eternal Life; nor is he an isolated, solitary idea for he represents infinite Mind, the sum of all substance.”

Now just as God, good, is counterfeited in devil, evil, so spiritual man is counterfeited in physical man, and all divine ideas and their identities in material ideas and their identities. For instance, Rousseau declares that the greatest enemy of the human race was the man to whom it first occurred to put a ring fence round a piece of ground, and to announce, “This is mine.” Without Truth a lie could not impose itself upon mankind; without spiritual substance there could be no counterfeit material universe. The psalmist understood this when he sang: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein;” and the writer of the wonderful drama of Job understood it, when he caused the Lord to answer out of the whirlwind, in the words: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail…?” What, of course, Rousseau, in his halting metaphysical way, was striving to imply was that the first person to whom the idea occurred, or the first person at any rate who succumbed to it, that he could inclose a little bit of the earth's surface as his very own, and pin up on the nearest tree a notice to the effect that trespassers would be prosecuted, was the archetype of the spirit of selfishness which was to cause so much trouble in the world. So much, indeed, that century after century man would fight man and nation would contend with nation for possession of this particular expression of the fullness of the Lord.

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