Chapter 10: 'Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures' by Mary Baker Eddy

Chapter X - Science Of Being

The divine reflection

301:1
yea, which manifests God's attributes and power, even

as the human likeness thrown upon the mirror, repeats

the color, form, and action of the person in front of the

mirror.

301:5
Few persons comprehend what Christian Science

means by the word reflection. To himself, mortal and

material man seems to be substance, but his sense of

substance involves error and therefore is material,

temporal.

301:10
On the other hand, the immortal, spiritual man is really

substantial, and reflects the eternal substance, or Spirit,

which mortals hope for. He reflects the divine, which

constitutes the only real and eternal entity. This reflection

seems to mortal sense transcendental, because the spiritual

man's substantiality transcends mortal vision and is re-

vealed only through divine Science.

Inverted images and ideas

301:17
As God is substance and man is the divine image and

likeness, man should wish for, and in reality has, only

the substance of good, the substance of Spirit,

not matter. The belief that man has any other

substance, or mind, is not spiritual and breaks

the First Commandment, Thou shalt have one God, one

Mind. Mortal man seems to himself to be material sub-

stance, while man is "image" (idea). Delusion, sin, dis-

ease, and death arise from the false testimony of material

sense, which, from a supposed standpoint outside the

focal distance of infinite Spirit, presents an inverted image

of Mind and substance with everything turned upside

down.

301:30
This falsity presupposes soul to be an unsubstantial

dweller in material forms, and man to be material instead

of spiritual. Immortality is not bounded by mortality.

302:1
Soul is not compassed by finiteness. Principle is not to

be found in fragmentary ideas.

Identity not lost

302:3
The material body and mind are temporal, but the

real man is spiritual and eternal. The identity of the

real man is not lost, but found through this

explanation; for the conscious infinitude of

existence and of all identity is thereby discerned and re-

mains unchanged. It is impossible that man should lose

aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his. The

notion that mind is in matter, and that the so-called pleas-

ures and pains, the birth, sin, sickness, and death of

matter, are real, is a mortal belief; and this belief is all

that will ever be lost.

Definition of man

302:14
Continuing our definition of man, let us remember that

harmonious and immortal man has existed forever, and

is always beyond and above the mortal illu-

sion of any life, substance and intelligence

as existent in matter. This statement is based on fact,

not fable. The Science of being reveals man as perfect,

even as the Father is perfect, because the Soul, or Mind,

of the spiritual man is God, the divine Principle of all

being, and because this real man is governed by Soul

instead of sense, by the law of Spirit, not by the so-called

laws of matter.

302:25
God is Love. He is therefore the divine, infinite Prin-

ciple, called Person or God. Man's true consciousness

is in the mental, not in any bodily or personal likeness

to Spirit. Indeed, the body presents no proper likeness

of divinity, though mortal sense would fain have us so

believe.

Mental propagation

302:31
Even in Christian Science, reproduction by Spirit's

individual ideas is but the reflection of the creative power

303:1
of the divine Principle of those ideas. The reflection,

through mental manifestation, of the multitudinous

forms of Mind which people the realm of

the real is controlled by Mind, the Principle

governing the reflection. Multiplication of God's chil-

dren comes from no power of propagation in matter, it

is the reflection of Spirit.

303:8
The minutiae of lesser individualities reflect the one di-

vine individuality and are comprehended in and formed

by Spirit, not by material sensation. Whatever reflects

Mind, Life, Truth, and Love, is spiritually conceived and

brought forth; but the statement that man is conceived

and evolved both spiritually and materially, or by both

God and man, contradicts this eternal truth. All the

vanity of the ages can never make both these contraries

true. Divine Science lays the axe at the root of the illu-

sion that life, or mind, is formed by or is in the material

body, and Science will eventually destroy this illusion

through the self-destruction of all error and the beatified

understanding of the Science of Life.

Error defined

303:21
The belief that pain and pleasure, life and death, holi-

ness and unholiness, mingle in man, – that

mortal, material man is the likeness of God

and is himself a creator, – is a fatal error.

Man's entity spiritual

303:25
God, without the image and likeness of Himself, would

be a nonentity, or Mind unexpressed. He would be

without a witness or proof of His own na-

ture. Spiritual man is the image or idea of

God, an idea which cannot be lost nor sep-

arated from its divine Principle. When the evidence

before the material senses yielded to spiritual sense, the

apostle declared that nothing could alienate him from

304:1
God, from the sweet sense and presence of Life and

Truth.

Man inseparable from Love

304:3
It is ignorance and false belief, based on a material

sense of things, which hide spiritual beauty and good-

ness. Understanding this, Paul said: "Nei-

ther death, nor life, . . . nor things present,

nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor

any other creature, shall be able to separate us from

the love of God." This is the doctrine of Christian

Science: that divine Love cannot be deprived of its

manifestation, or object; that joy cannot be turned into

sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy; that good can

never produce evil; that matter can never produce mind

nor life result in death. The perfect man – governed

by God, his perfect Principle – is sinless and eternal.

Harmony natural

304:16
Harmony is produced by its Principle, is controlled

by it and abides with it. Divine Principle is the Life

of man. Man's happiness is not, therefore, at

the disposal of physical sense. Truth is not

contaminated by error. Harmony in man is as beautiful

as in music, and discord is unnatural, unreal.

304:22
The science of music governs tones. If mortals caught

harmony through material sense, they would lose har-

mony, if time or accident robbed them of material sense.

To be master of chords and discords, the science of

music must be understood. Left to the decisions

of material sense, music is liable to be misappre-

hended and lost in confusion. Controlled by belief,

instead of understanding, music is, must be, imper-

fectly expressed. So man, not understanding the Sci-

ence of being, – thrusting aside his divine Principle as

incomprehensible, – is abandoned to conjectures, left in

305:1
the hands of ignorance, placed at the disposal of illusions,

subjected to material sense which is discord. A discon-

tented, discordant mortal is no more a man than discord

is music.

Human reflection

305:5
A picture in the camera or a face reflected in the mirror

is not the original, though resembling it. Man, in the

likeness of his Maker, reflects the central light

of being, the invisible God. As there is no cor-

poreality in the mirrored form, which is but a reflection,

so man, like all things real, reflects God, his divine Prin-

ciple, not in a mortal body.

305:12
Gender also is a quality, not of God, but a character-

istic of mortal mind. The verity that God's image is not

a creator, though he reflects the creation of Mind, God,

constitutes the underlying reality of reflection. "Then

answered Jesus and said unto them: Verily, verily I say

unto you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he

seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth,

these also doeth the Son likewise."

Inverted images

305:20
The inverted images presented by the senses, the de-

flections of matter as opposed to the Science of spirit-

ual reflection, are all unlike Spirit, God. In

the illusion of life that is here to-day and

gone to-morrow, man would be wholly mortal, were

it not that Love, the divine Principle that obtains in

divine Science, destroys all error and brings immor-

tality to light. Because man is the reflection of his

Maker, he is not subject to birth, growth, maturity, de-

cay. These mortal dreams are of human origin, not

divine.

Jewish traditions

305:31
The Sadducees reasoned falsely about the resurrec-

tion, but not so blindly as the Pharisees, who believed

306:1
error to be as immortal as Truth. The Pharisees thought

that they could raise the spiritual from the material. They

would first make life result in death, and then

resort to death to reproduce spiritual life.

Jesus taught them how death was to be overcome by

spiritual Life, and demonstrated this beyond cavil.

Divinity not childless

306:7
Life demonstrates Life. The immortality of Soul makes

man immortal. If God, who is Life, were parted for a

moment from His reflection, man, during that

moment there would be no divinity reflected.

The Ego would be unexpressed, and the Father would be

childless, – no Father.

306:13
If Life or Soul and its representative, man, unite for

a period and then are separated as by a law of divorce to

be brought together again at some uncertain future time

and in a manner unknown, – and this is the general

religious opinion of mankind, – we are left without a

rational proof of immortality. But man cannot be sep-

arated for an instant from God, if man reflects God.

Thus Science proves man's existence to be intact.

Thought-forms

306:21
The myriad forms of mortal thought, made manifest

as matter, are not more distinct nor real to the mate-

rial senses than are the Soul-created forms

to spiritual sense, which cognizes Life as per-

manent. Undisturbed amid the jarring testimony of the

material senses, Science, still enthroned, is unfolding

to mortals the immutable, harmonious, divine Principle,

– is unfolding Life and the universe, ever present and

eternal.

306:30
God's man, spiritually created, is not material and

mortal.

The serpent's whisper

306:32
The parent of all human discord was the Adam-dream,

307:1
the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life

and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter.

This pantheistic error, or so-called serpent, in-

sists still upon the opposite of Truth, saying,

"Ye shall be as gods;" that is, I will make error as real

and eternal as Truth.

307:7
Evil still affirms itself to be mind, and declares that

there is more than one intelligence or God. It says:

"There shall be lords and gods many. I declare that God

makes evil minds and evil spirits, and that I aid Him.

Truth shall change sides and be unlike Spirit. I will

put spirit into what I call matter, and matter shall seem

to have life as much as God, Spirit, who is the only life."

Bad results from error

307:14
This error has proved itself to be error. Its life is found

to be not Life, but only a transient, false sense of an ex-

istence which ends in death. Error charges

its lie to Truth and says: "The Lord knows

it. He has made man mortal and material, out of mat-

ter instead of Spirit." Thus error partakes of its own

nature and utters its own falsities. If we regard matter

as intelligent, and Mind as both good and evil, every sin

or supposed material pain and pleasure seems normal,

a part of God's creation, and so weighs against our course

Spiritward.

Higher statutes

307:25
Truth has no beginning. The divine Mind is the Soul

of man, and gives man dominion over all things. Man

was not created from a material basis, nor

bidden to obey material laws which Spirit never

made; his province is in spiritual statutes, in the higher

law of Mind.

The great question

307:31
Above error's awful din, blackness, and chaos, the voice

of Truth still calls: "Adam, where art thou? Conscious-

308:1
ness, where art thou? Art thou dwelling in the belief

that mind is in matter, and that evil is mind, or art thou

in the living faith that there is and can be but

one God, and keeping His commandment?"

Until the lesson is learned that God is the only Mind gov-

erning man, mortal belief will be afraid as it was in the

beginning, and will hide from the demand, "Where art

thou?" This awful demand, "Adam, where art thou?"

is met by the admission from the head, heart, stomach,

blood, nerves, etc.: "Lo, here I am, looking for happiness

and life in the body, but finding only an illusion, a blend-

ing of false claims, false pleasure, pain, sin, sickness, and

death."

308:14
The Soul-inspired patriarchs heard the voice of Truth,

and talked with God as consciously as man talks with man.

Wrestling of Jacob

308:16
Jacob was alone, wrestling with error, – struggling

with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence

as existent in matter with its false pleasures

and pains, – when an angel, a message from

Truth and Love, appeared to him and smote the sinew,

or strength, of his error, till he saw its unreality; and

Truth, being thereby understood, gave him spiritual

strength in this Peniel of divine Science. Then said

the spiritual evangel: "Let me go, for the day breaketh;"

that is, the light of Truth and Love dawns upon thee.

But the patriarch, perceiving his error and his need

of help, did not loosen his hold upon this glorious light

until his nature was transformed. When Jacob was

asked, "What is thy name?" he straightway answered;

and then his name was changed to Israel, for "as a prince"

had he prevailed and had "power with God and with

men." Then Jacob questioned his deliverer, "Tell me,

309:1
I pray thee, thy name;" but this appellation was withheld,

for the messenger was not a corporeal being, but a name-

less, incorporeal impartation of divine Love to man, which,

to use the word of the Psalmist, restored his Soul, – gave

him the spiritual sense of being and rebuked his material

sense.

Israel the new name

309:7
The result of Jacob's struggle thus appeared. He had

conquered material error with the understanding of Spirit

and of spiritual power. This changed the man.

He was no longer called Jacob, but Israel, –

a prince of God, or a soldier of God, who had fought

a good fight. He was to become the father of those, who

through earnest striving followed his demonstration of the

power of Spirit over the material senses; and the children

of earth who followed his example were to be called the

children of Israel, until the Messiah should rename them.

If these children should go astray, and forget that Life

is God, good, and that good is not in elements which are

not spiritual, – thus losing the divine power which heals

the sick and sinning, – they were to be brought back

through great tribulation, to be renamed in Christian

Science and led to deny material sense, or mind in matter,

even as the gospel teaches.

Life never structural

309:24
The Science of being shows it to be impossible for in-

finite Spirit or Soul to be in a finite body or for man to

have an intelligence separate from his Maker.

It is a self-evident error to suppose that there

can be such a reality as organic animal or vegetable life,

when such so-called life always ends in death. Life is

never for a moment extinct. Therefore it is never struc-

tural nor organic, and is never absorbed nor limited by its

own formations.

Thought seen as substance

310:1
The artist is not in his painting. The picture is the

artist's thought objectified. The human belief fancies

that it delineates thought on matter, but what

is matter? Did it exist prior to thought?

Matter is made up of supposititious mortal mind-force;

but all might is divine Mind. Thought will finally be

understood and seen in all form, substance, and color, but

without material accompaniments. The potter is not in

the clay; else the clay would have power over the potter.

God is His own infinite Mind, and expresses all.

The central intelligence

310:11
Day may decline and shadows fall, but darkness flees

when the earth has again turned upon its axis. The sun

is not affected by the revolution of the earth.

So Science reveals Soul as God, untouched

by sin and death, – as the central life and intelligence

around which circle harmoniously all things in the sys-

tems of Mind.

Soul imperishable

310:18
Soul changeth not. We are commonly taught that there

is a human soul which sins and is spiritually lost, – that

soul may be lost, and yet be immortal. If

Soul could sin, Spirit, Soul, would be flesh in-

stead of Spirit. It is the belief of the flesh and of mate-

rial sense which sins. If Soul sinned, Soul would die.

Sin is the element of self-destruction, and spiritual death

is oblivion. If there was sin in Soul, the annihilation of

Spirit would be inevitable. The only Life is Spirit, and

if Spirit should lose Life as God, good, then Spirit, which

has no other existence, would be annihilated.

310:29
Mind is God, and God is not seen by material sense,

because Mind is Spirit, which material sense cannot dis-

cern. There is neither growth, maturity, nor decay in

Soul. These changes are the mutations of material sense,

311:1
the varying clouds of mortal belief, which hide the truth

of being.

311:3
What we term mortal mind or carnal mind, dependent

on matter for manifestation, is not Mind. God is Mind:

all that Mind, God, is, or hath made, is good, and He

made all. Hence evil is not made and is not real.

Sin only of the flesh

311:7
Soul is immortal because it is Spirit, which has no ele-

ment of self-destruction. Is man lost spiritually? No,

he can only lose a sense material. All sin is

of the flesh. It cannot be spiritual. Sin exists

here or hereafter only so long as the illusion of mind in

matter remains. It is a sense of sin, and not a sinful soul,

which is lost. Evil is destroyed by the sense of good.

Soul impeccable

311:14
Through false estimates of soul as dwelling in sense

and of mind as dwelling in matter, belief strays into a

sense of temporary loss or absence of soul, spir-

itual truth. This state of error is the mortal

dream of life and substance as existent in matter, and is

directly opposite to the immortal reality of being. So long

as we believe that soul can sin or that immortal Soul is in

mortal body, we can never understand the Science of be-

ing. When humanity does understand this Science, it

will become the law of Life to man, – even the higher law

of Soul, which prevails over material sense through har-

mony and immortality.

311:26
The objects cognized by the physical senses have not

the reality of substance. They are only what mortal

belief calls them. Matter, sin, and mortality lose all

supposed consciousness or claim to life or existence, as

mortals lay off a false sense of life, substance, and intelli-

gence, but the spiritual, eternal man is not touched by

these phases of mortality.

Sense-dreams

312:1
How true it is that whatever is learned through material

sense must be lost because such so-called knowledge is

reversed by the spiritual facts of being in

Science. That which material sense calls

intangible, is found to be substance. What to material

sense seems substance, becomes nothingness, as the sense‑

dream vanishes and reality appears.

312:8
The senses regard a corpse, not as man, but simply as

matter. People say, "Man is dead;" but this death is

the departure of a mortal's mind, not of matter. The

matter is still there. The belief of that mortal that he

must die occasioned his departure; yet you say that

matter has caused his death.

Vain ecstasies

312:14
People go into ecstasies over the sense of a corporeal

Jehovah, though with scarcely a spark of love in their

hearts; yet God is love, and without Love,

God, immortality cannot appear. Mortals try

to believe without understanding Truth; yet God is

Truth. Mortals claim that death is inevitable; but man's

eternal Principle is ever-present life. Mortals believe in

a finite personal God; while God is infinite Love, which

must be unlimited.

Man-made theories

312:23
Our theories are based on finite premises, which can-

not penetrate beyond matter. A personal sense of God

and of man's capabilities necessarily limits

faith and hinders spiritual understanding. It

divides faith and understanding between matter and Spirit,

the finite and the infinite, and so turns away from the

intelligent and divine healing Principle to the inanimate

drug.

The one anointed

312:31
Jesus' spiritual origin and his demonstration of divine

Principle richly endowed him and entitled him to sonship

313:1
in Science. He was the son of a virgin. The term

Christ Jesus, or Jesus the Christ (to give the full and

proper translation of the Greek), may be ren-

dered "Jesus the anointed," Jesus the God‑

crowned or the divinely royal man, as it is said of him in

the first chapter of Hebrews: –

313:7
Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee

With the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

313:9
With this agrees another passage in the same chapter,

which refers to the Son as "the brightness of His [God's]

glory, and the express [expressed] image of His person

[infinite Mind]." It is noteworthy that the phrase "ex-

press image" in the Common Version is, in the Greek

Testament, character. Using this word in its higher mean-

ing, we may assume that the author of this remarkable

epistle regarded Christ as the Son of God, the royal

reflection of the infinite; and the cause given for the ex-

altation of Jesus, Mary's son, was that he "loved right-

eousness and hated iniquity." The passage is made

even clearer in the translation of the late George R.

Noyes, D.D.: "Who, being a brightness from His glory,

and an image of His being."

Jesus the Scientist

313:23
Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that

ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material

surface of things, and found the spiritual

cause. To accommodate himself to imma-

ture ideas of spiritual power, – for spirituality was pos

sessed only in a limited degree even by his disciples, –

Jesus called the body, which by spiritual power he

raised from the grave, "flesh and bones." To show

that the substance of himself was Spirit and the body

314:1
no more perfect because of death and no less material

until the ascension (his further spiritual exaltation),

Jesus waited until the mortal or fleshly sense had re-

linquished the belief of substance-matter, and spiritual

sense had quenched all earthly yearnings. Thus he found

the eternal Ego, and proved that he and the Father were

inseparable as God and His reflection or spiritual man.

Our Master gained the solution of being, demonstrating

the existence of but one Mind without a second or equal.

The bodily resurrection

314:10
The Jews, who sought to kill this man of God, showed

plainly that their material views were the parents of their

wicked deeds. When Jesus spoke of repro-

ducing his body, – knowing, as he did, that

Mind was the builder, – and said, "Destroy this temple,

and in three days I will raise it up," they thought that he

meant their material temple instead of his body. To such

materialists, the real man seemed a spectre, unseen and

unfamiliar, and the body, which they laid in a sepulchre,

seemed to be substance. This materialism lost sight of

the true Jesus; but the faithful Mary saw him, and he

presented to her, more than ever before, the true idea of

Life and substance.

Opposition of materialists

314:23
Because of mortals' material and sinful belief, the

spiritual Jesus was imperceptible to them. The higher

his demonstration of divine Science carried

the problem of being, and the more dis-

tinctly he uttered the demands of its divine Principle,

Truth and Love, the more odious he became to sinners

and to those who, depending on doctrines and material

laws to save them from sin and sickness, were submis-

sive to death as being in supposed accord with the

inevitable law of life. Jesus proved them wrong by

315:1
his resurrection, and said: "Whosoever liveth and be-

lieveth in me shall never die."

Hebrew theology

315:3
That saying of our Master, "I and my Father are one,"

separated him from the scholastic theology of the rabbis.

His better understanding of God was a rebuke

to them. He knew of but one Mind and laid

no claim to any other. He knew that the Ego was Mind

instead of body and that matter, sin, and evil were not

Mind; and his understanding of this divine Science

brought upon him the anathemas of the age.

The true sonship

315:11
The opposite and false views of the people hid from

their sense Christ's sonship with God. They could not

discern his spiritual existence. Their carnal

minds were at enmity with it. Their thoughts

were filled with mortal error, instead of with God's spirit-

ual idea as presented by Christ Jesus. The likeness of

God we lose sight of through sin, which beclouds the spir-

itual sense of Truth; and we realize this likeness only

when we subdue sin and prove man's heritage, the liberty

of the sons of God.

Immaculate conception

315:21
Jesus' spiritual origin and understanding enabled him

to demonstrate the facts of being, – to prove irrefutably

how spiritual Truth destroys material error,

heals sickness, and overcomes death. The

divine conception of Jesus pointed to this truth and pre-

sented an illustration of creation. The history of Jesus

shows him to have been more spiritual than all other

earthly personalities.

Jesus as mediator

315:29
Wearing in part a human form (that is, as it seemed

to mortal view), being conceived by a human mother,

Jesus was the mediator between Spirit and the flesh,

between Truth and error. Explaining and demonstrat-

316:1
ing the way of divine Science, he became the way of

salvation to all who accepted his word. From him mor-

tals may learn how to escape from evil. The

real man being linked by Science to his Maker,

mortals need only turn from sin and lose sight of mortal

selfhood to find Christ, the real man and his relation to

God, and to recognize the divine sonship. Christ, Truth,

was demonstrated through Jesus to prove the power of

Spirit over the flesh, – to show that Truth is made

manifest by its effects upon the human mind and body,

healing sickness and destroying sin.

Spiritual government

316:12
Jesus represented Christ, the true idea of God. Hence

the warfare between this spiritual idea and perfunctory

religion, between spiritual clear-sightedness

and the blindness of popular belief, which led

to the conclusion that the spiritual idea could be killed

by crucifying the flesh. The Christ-idea, or the Christ‑

man, rose higher to human view because of the crucifixion,

and thus proved that truth was the master of death.

Christ presents the indestructible man, whom Spirit cre-

ates, constitutes, and governs. Christ illustrates that

blending with God, his divine Principle, which gives man

dominion over all the earth.

Deadness in sin

316:24
The spiritual idea of God, as presented by Jesus, was

scourged in person, and its Principle was rejected. That

man was accounted a criminal who could

prove God's divine power by healing the

sick, casting out evils, spiritualizing materialistic beliefs,

and raising the dead, – those dead in trespasses and

sins, satisfied with the flesh, resting on the basis of mat-

ter, blind to the possibilities of Spirit and its correla-

tive truth.

317:1
Jesus uttered things which had been "secret from the

foundation of the world," – since material knowledge

usurped the throne of the creative divine Principle, insisted

on the might of matter, the force of falsity, the insignifi-

cance of spirit, and proclaimed an anthropomorphic God.

The cup of Jesus

317:6
Whosoever lives most the life of Jesus in this age

and declares best the power of Christian Science, will

drink of his Master's cup. Resistance to

Truth will haunt his steps, and he will in-

cur the hatred of sinners, till "wisdom is justified of

her children." These blessed benedictions rest upon

Jesus' followers: "If the world hate you, ye know that

it hated me before it hated you;" "Lo, I am with you

alway," – that is, not only in all time, but in all ways

and conditions.

317:16
The individuality of man is no less tangible because

it is spiritual and because his life is not at the mercy of

matter. The understanding of his spiritual individuality

makes man more real, more formidable in truth, and en-

ables him to conquer sin, disease, and death. Our Lord

and Master presented himself to his disciples after his

resurrection from the grave, as the self-same Jesus whom

they had loved before the tragedy on Calvary.

Material skepticism

317:24
To the materialistic Thomas, looking for the ideal

Saviour in matter instead of in Spirit and to the testi-

mony of the material senses and the body,

more than to Soul, for an earnest of immor-

tality, – to him Jesus furnished the proof that he was

unchanged by the crucifixion. To this dull and doubt-

ing disciple Jesus remained a fleshly reality, so long as

the Master remained an inhabitant of the earth. Noth-

ing but a display of matter could make existence real

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