A linchpin of the system of Christian Science is that man is the outcome of God, always spiritual and in unity with Him, and never a mortal wanting to be united with Him. This truth of being is demonstrable in our everyday affairs to the extent that we lay aside mortal identification—that is, thinking of ourselves as mortal persons, primates, rather than as God's spiritual reflection.

Mortal man is not the expression of God's being but a distortion of it. Imposing all limitation and suffering are the arguments— apparently supported by sense evidence—that man is mortal, and has broken away from his divine origin, God. A conviction that in our actual selfhood we are the expression of God rather than an organic mortal entity is demonstrably the way to healing.

The healing significance of our unity with God is clarified as we consider the synonyms Christian Science applies to God. These synonyms round out our sense of Deity and make Him comprehensible to human thought. God is Truth, Love, Principle, Spirit, Mind, Soul, Life.

The liberating Science of man's unity with God shows that man is not a mortal seeking to understand and demonstrate Truth but that man is the expression of Truth itself. To put this spiritual fact into practice, we must deny the claim and the appearance that we have a mortal outline and, instead, acknowledge that man—our genuine selfhood—is God's boundless expression of Himself.

God's man, your real self and mine, is not a mortal, finite creature outside divine Love, trying to break out of loneliness and despair. Man, we can start proving now, is what divine Love is now expressing.

According to the teachings of Christian Science—in which God and His idea, man, including the universe, comprise all that is real—we are not actually finite entities seeking to apprehend and apply the laws of divine Principle, God. As man, we are not anxious personalities looking for coherence and continuity in our lives. Very much to the contrary. We are what divine Principle is manifesting here, now, forever.

Man is not a finite person, outside divine Spirit, or God, hoping to grasp substance and freedom yet feeling locked into matter. Man, our only truthful identity, is divine Spirit's evidence of itself in this moment and ever. Our unity with Spirit is eternal.

A mystified mortal, swirling in the currents of material ignorance and doubt, striving to understand himself and his reason for being, and questioning the reality of God, is not man. Man is the satisfied representation of omniscient Mind, God. He is purely divine Mind's self-expression. Just as certainly as the hardness of rock can't be cleaved from the rock, so man can't be cleaved from Mind.

True man is not a mortal suffering from the ambiguities and misconceptions of personal identity, looking and longing for place and purpose. He is not a mortal coping with ugliness and suffering. But he is the illimitable idea of illimitable Soul, experiencing only immortal beauty and painless bliss, because he is the immediate expression of Soul.

In Science, man is not a mortal, wondering where he came from, anxious about his health, fearing death, thirsting for a higher sense of existence. Divine Life and its likeness, man, are one. Man is not an organism encasing a temporal life but is what eternal Life itself is manifesting.

Man is not a mortal trying to be perfect, trying to change, hoping to be complete. Man is an immortal, the embodiment of all Deity creates. The challenge—which we can begin accepting now, because Science explains how to meet it—is to acknowledge one's God-given and God-defended immortality and to shed belief in mortality. Although this may seem to human sense to be a slow and even labored process, the reality of being is established now and here. Even a glimmer of this endlessly enduring fact can bring about healing and adjustment of whatever is not right.

Christ Jesus' words and works point to and confirm the everlasting unity of God and man. He prayed for his disciples, "Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are." ^{John 17:11;} Mrs. Eddy, through the purity of her spiritual vision, discerned and proved the Science of this oneness. She writes in appreciation of the Way-shower: "Jesus of Nazareth taught and demonstrated man's oneness with the Father, and for this we owe him endless homage." ^{Science and Health, p. 18.} As we today increasingly perceive our unity with God, and live in accord with it, we feel the deepest gratitude for Christ Jesus and for the Science of Christ.

Geoffrey J. Barratt