Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/171

Rh belong to the native nothingness of error, — simulating the creation of Mind through dust that returns to dust, instead of through Spirit that is eternal. Error supposes man to he both mental and material. Divine Science contradicts this postulate, and rebukes material sense.

To the question, “What is the Ego; whence its origin, what its destiny?” Christian Science replies: I is Spirit or Soul, not physical sense. There is but one I, one Mind or Spirit, because there is but one God. Man reflects this one Mind, and the personal I surrenders to the Father, from whom man's individuality is reflected spiritually. Man, in the likeness of God, is not matter.

Spirit is God, Soul; and Soul, or Spirit, is not in man; else God would have but one representative, namely, man, and man would be identical with God. Man is the spiritual idea of God; and God is not in His reflection, any more than a man is in the mirror which returns his likeness.

Man should have no other Mind than God. In reality he has not. It is only a delusion that he seems to have another mind; and this delusion is the inverted image of Mind, in everything turned upside-down, fancying that Soul is in body, Spirit in matter, Immortality in mortality, the Infinite in the finite, and Principle in fragmentary ideas.

To grasp the reality and order of being, we must begin by reckoning God as the only Life, Substance, and Intelligence. We must leave sin, sickness, and death out of the account, regarding them as not the reality of being, but as its counterfeit, and recognizing the genuine selfhood only in what is good and true; for man is not the offspring of flesh, but of Spirit.