From the Platform of Christian Science
and the definitions of "mortal
mind."
West
(-13-
The divine Principle and idea)
XIII. The advent of Jesus of Nazareth marked the first century of the
Christian era, but the Christ is without beginning of years or end of
days. Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era,
the Christ, as the spiritual idea, - the reflection of God, - has come
with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ,
Truth. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets caught glorious glimpses of
the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature,
the essence of Love. The divine image, idea, or Christ was, is, and ever
will be inseparable from the divine Principle, God. Jesus referred to this
unity of his spiritual identity thus: "Before Abraham was, I
am;" "I and my Father are one;" "My Father is greater
than I." The one Spirit includes all identities.
East
(-14-
Spiritual oneness)
XIV. By these sayings Jesus meant, not that the human Jesus was or is
eternal, but that the divine idea or Christ was and is so and therefore
antedated Abraham; not that the corporeal Jesus was one with the Father,
but that the spiritual idea, Christ, dwells forever in the bosom of the
Father, God, from which it illumines heaven and earth; not that the Father
is greater than Spirit, which is God, but greater, infinitely greater,
than the fleshly Jesus, whose earthly career was brief.
mortal mind
the belief that
life has a beginning and therefore an end;
Recapitulation Questions
Lesson topics, and the definition of Adam
West
Question 13. - Is there no sin?
ADAM = The opposite of Spirit and His creations.
(Unrealities that seem real)
Answer. - All reality is in God and His creation,
harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all
that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the
awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God
strips off their disguise. They are not true, because they are not of God.
We learn in Christian Science that all inharmony of mortal mind or body is
illusion, possessing neither reality nor identity though seeming to be
real and identical.
(Christ the ideal Truth)
The Science of Mind disposes of all evil. Truth, God, is not the father of
error. Sin, sickness, and death are to be classified as effects of error.
Christ came to destroy the belief of sin. The God-principle is omnipresent
and omnipotent. God is everywhere, and nothing apart from Him is present
or has power. Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and
sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to God. Jesus is
the name of the man who, more than all other men, has presented Christ,
the true idea of God, healing the sick and the sinning and destroying the
power of death. Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea;
hence the duality of Jesus the Christ.
(Jesus not God)
In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching and
practice of Christianity, affording the proof of Christianity's truth and
love; but to reach his example and to test its unerring Science according
to his rule, healing sickness, sin, and death, a better understanding of
God as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus,
is required.
(Jesus not understood)
Jesus established what he said by demonstration, thus making his acts of
higher importance than his words. He proved what he taught. This is the
Science of Christianity. Jesus proved the Principle,
which heals the sick and casts out error, to be divine. Few, however,
except his students understood in the least his teachings and their
glorious proofs, - namely, that Life, Truth, and Love (the Principle of
this unacknowledged Science) destroy all error, evil, disease, and death.
(Miracles rejected)
The reception accorded to Truth in the early Christian era is repeated
to-day. Whoever introduces the Science of Christianity will be scoffed at
and scourged with worse cords than those which cut the flesh. To the
ignorant age in which it first appears, Science seems to be a mistake, -
hence the misinterpretation and consequent maltreatment which it receives.
Christian marvels (and marvel is the simple meaning of
the Greek word rendered miracle in the New Testament)
will be misunderstood and misused by many, until the glorious Principle of
these marvels is gained.
(Divine fulfilment)
If sin, sickness, and death are as real as Life, Truth, and Love, then
they must all be from the same source; God must be their author. Now Jesus
came to destroy sin, sickness, and death; yet the Scriptures aver, "I
am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." Is it possible, then, to
believe that the evils which Jesus lived to destroy are real or the
offspring of the divine will?
(Truth destroys falsity)
Despite the hallowing influence of Truth in the destruction of error, must
error still be immortal? Truth spares all that is true. If evil is real,
Truth must make it so; but error, not Truth, is the author of the unreal,
and the unreal vanishes, while all that is real is eternal. The apostle
says that the mission of Christ is to "destroy the works of the
devil." Truth destroys falsity and error, for light and darkness
cannot dwell together. Light extinguishes the darkness, and the Scripture
declares that there is "no night there." To Truth there is no
error, - all is Truth. To infinite Spirit there is no matter, - all is
Spirit, divine Principle and its idea.
East
Question 14. - What is man?
ADAM = That which is not the image and likeness of
good, but a
material belief, opposed to the one Mind, or Spirit.
(Fleshly factors unreal)
Answer. - Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain,
blood, bones, and other material elements. The Scriptures inform us that
man is made in the image and likeness of God. Matter is not that likeness.
The likeness of Spirit cannot be so unlike Spirit. Man is spiritual and
perfect; and because he is spiritual and perfect, he must be so understood
in Christian Science. Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique.
He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic
term for all that reflects God's image and likeness; the conscious
identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of
God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind
from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that
which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but
reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker.
And God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
thing that creepeth upon the earth."
(Man unfallen)
Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man cannot depart
from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity
or freedom to sin. A mortal sinner is not God's man. Mortals are the
counterfeits of immortals. They are the children of the wicked one, or the
one evil, which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo.
In divine Science, God and the real man are inseparable as divine
Principle and idea.
(Mortals are not immortals)
Error, urged to its final limits, is self-destroyed. Error will cease to
claim that soul is in body, that life and intelligence are in matter, and
that this matter is man. God is the Principle of man, and man is the idea
of God. Hence man is not mortal nor material. Mortals will disappear, and
immortals, or the children of God, will appear as the only and eternal
verities of man. Mortals are not fallen children of God. They never had a
perfect state of being, which may subsequently be regained. They were,
from the beginning of mortal history, "conceived in sin and brought
forth in iniquity." Mortality is finally swallowed up in immortality.
Sin, sickness, and death must disappear to give place to the facts which
belong to immortal man.
(Imperishable identity)
Learn this, O mortal, and earnestly seek the spiritual status of man,
which is outside of all material selfhood. Remember that the Scriptures
say of mortal man: "As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of
the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is
gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more."
(The kingdom within)
When speaking of God's children, not the children of men, Jesus said,
"The kingdom of God is within you;" that is, Truth and Love
reign in the real man, showing that man in God's image is unfallen and
eternal. Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him
where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the
Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the
sick. Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact, universal, and
that man is pure and holy. Man is not a material habitation for Soul; he
is himself spiritual. Soul, being Spirit, is seen in nothing imperfect nor
material.
(Material body never God's idea)
Whatever is material is mortal. To the five corporeal senses, man appears
to be matter and mind united; but Christian Science reveals man as the
idea of God, and declares the corporeal senses to be mortal and erring
illusions. Divine Science shows it to be impossible that a material body,
though interwoven with matter's highest stratum, misnamed mind, should be
man, - the genuine and perfect man, the immortal idea of being,
indestructible and eternal. Were it otherwise, man would be annihilated.
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