Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/137

Rh The reader is requested to notice that this doctrine of Mrs. Eddy is based not upon the relation of two persons, father and son, the latter of whom may sin and not involve the character of the other; but upon the relation of an idea to the mind, in which case imperfection in the idea demonstrates imperfection in the mind. It is connected logically with the doctrine set forth above that man is not a free agent, that all his ideas are causally determined. The cause is therefore accountable for the effect or contains the effect. Let us not forget that in Christian Science man is not a person but an idea or a collection of ideas. The student of philosophy will readily see that in all this we have a reproduction of the Neoplatonic development of Plato's world of ideas in which there is no imperfect idea. The world of ideas became for the Neoplatonists God's ideas. As this phase of the subject belongs more properly to psychology, I defer further treatment of it here.

Since Mrs. Eddy denies to man a fall or lapse in his essential nature and professes to hold to the Bible, it is interesting to see how she deals with the account of the sin of Adam and Eve as recorded in Genesis.

In brief it is this. In the third chapter of Genesis, we have not an account of the sin or lap?e of immortal man but of the origin of mortal man. Now what is mortal man as here characterized? Mortal man or mortal mind is the belief that there is a reality, or something, other than or opposite to God.