Broadly defined, Christian Science is living, bringing out in practical demonstration, the Christ-life. Christian Science does away with the vicarious atonement, in so far as it discards the commonly accepted doctrine that the shedding of Jesus' blood paid the penalty for man's transgression, without human work or effort. In other words, our Science holds with James, "that faith without works is dead."
It declares the Life, and not the death of Jesus of Nazareth, to be the open way for man's redemption.
Christ came as the desire of the people. His mission was to reconcile man to God, not God to man. To this end he must enter upon this Adam-dream as a little child. His birth must be after a manner that should bring again to mankind, lost in the sensuous beliefs of the decadence of that Roman age, the proof of man's purity and perfection, as he came from the hand of his Maker. He was not conceived in sin, nor shapen in iniquity. He set at naught the law of human generation, thus declaring God the only life-giver, the only creator.
