A Student of Christian Science was admiring some beautiful water lilies when suddenly she saw in the still water of the pond her own reflection—a perfect image of herself. A little while later, a sudden gust of wind sprang up and disturbed the water. When she looked again, the picture that had been so clear was distorted and hardly recognizable.

This experience served as an object lesson of the fact that the real man, the perfect reflection of God, is seen only when the material, so-called senses are silenced and the false belief that man lives in a material body and is a mortal being is relinquished. The lie that there is life, truth, intelligence, and substance in matter would dethrone God's reflection and make one believe that sick and sorrowful human beings are indeed His image and likeness.

Just as the reflection which was seen in the still water was perfect, so the perfect man, whom God has made, is seen through spiritual sense when the clamor of the material senses with their manifold wants and selfish desires is stilled. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10). Being still in the consciousness of God's allness, knowing the unreality of material selfhood, one can discern something of man's true selfhood, the unselfed self, which is the image and likeness of God.

The real man can reflect only what is good and true, for he coexists with and expresses his Maker, divine Love. As the child of the Father-Mother God, he experiences only love and all good—peace, happiness, harmony, and health. Suspicion, fear, anxiety, and worry are not of God and do not belong to Him. They therefore cannot belong to His children.

This truth was proved by a widow who was dependent upon what her children earned. She found that her monthly allowance, which she had left for a few moments on her dressing table, had disappeared. She partly suspected a boy employed in the flats where she lived of taking it. In deepest distress over the situation she went to a friend who was a Christian Scientist and asked her to help her find what she had lost.

Her friend pointed out to her that the boy was, in his real being, God's reflection, and that since dishonesty, greed, and theft are not to be found in God, neither can they exist in man, His likeness. She was told that God, good, is everywhere, and therefore evil cannot be anywhere or in anybody. She saw that since what she had been thinking was not good, it was not of God, and that as she was in reality the child of God, she could not think or accept anything but good. She realized that as God had given her all, nothing could be taken from her and nothing added to her. Needless to say, a short time later the money was found intact.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 346), "When man is spoken of as made in God's image, it is not sinful and sickly mortal man who is referred to, but the ideal man, reflecting God's likeness." This Godlike man is the true selfhood of you and me, here and now, for we read in the first epistle of John (3:2), "Now are we the sons of God."

God is the light of man's being. Man as reflection, without God as the light and life of his being, would be a nonentity, for man is dependent on God for all he is and has. God is the source and cause of all that exists, and with Him all things are possible. Realizing this truth, we shall trust Him and His loving care for us, and when things seem impossible, know that, as our Leader says (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 183), "Whatever is possible to God, is possible to man as God's reflection."

Man is the manifestation, the perfect representation, of the one Mind, God, in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He is upright, healthy, harmonious, and free. He knows and expresses only good. There is nothing to disturb and distort the harmony of man's being. He is not subject to any phases of mortal belief, such as depression, suppression, or oppression, for he is eternally the expression of Love's perfection and of Life's permanence.

Mortal man, so called, has no origin. The second chapter of Genesis relates (verses 6, 7): "There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face, of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground." But this man formed from dust cannot be the real man, who reflects God, Spirit. Rather, the mist that arose from the ground obscures to human sense the vision of the real man and the real universe. The dust, or matter concept, is simply a mis- (or mist-) formation or conception, something unreal and untrue, an illusion of the so-called material senses which God, good, did not make.

Christian Science teaches us to look steadfastly away from the warped, mortal deflection and to acquaint ourselves with the true reflection of God—the man who reflects the qualities of divine Mind in the radiance, calm, and perpetuity of spiritual activity. Man is God's compound idea, a pure, spiritual, boundless idea in Mind, an idea which cannot be separated from the light and loveliness of divine Mind throughout eternity.