The thought of getting or of making the spiritual out of the material, either directly or through an effort to etherealize its nature, the belief in the salvability of every sense of life, no matter how false or degraded it may be,—this is one of the crowning mistakes of the centuries. This mistake originates in the failure to discriminate between mortal man and immortal man, and it is well illustrated in the following clerical query, which we copy from a religious exchange: "Cannot God reclaim the most stubborn and depraved of His children?"
It is manifest that in any undertaking the mental concept and attitude respecting the nature of the work to be accomplished is of the highest significance, and in no respect, perhaps, does Christian Science present a greater contrast to general religious opinion than in its rejection of the long prevailing idea that mortal man is to be made over into immortal man, and in its insistence that redemption is not the change of evil into good, but rather the destruction of a false mortal sense and all its claims, the removal of that mask of the material which to human sense hides the spiritual, the kingdom of heaven and man.
It will readily be seen that the belief that redemption is a revamping process grows out of the belief in the reality of the unperfect. This idea of making over necessitates first of all the positing of the thing which is thus to be remodeled, which thing must be thought of as having entity, and which therefore must be accounted for. To speak of God's "stubborn and depraved children," however, as has the above writer, immediately involves the entertainment of many thoughts about God which are altogether incongruous, which are at war with the fundamental teaching of the Master respecting the divine nature and activities, and which, therefore, cannot be true. "God has no bastards. ... The divine children are born of law and order, and Truth knows only such" (Unity of Good, p. 28). If all that God creates is good and "very good," then things which need mending cannot come from His hand, hence they have neither substance nor reality, and are therefore no-thing,—only a seeming. We thus see that the making-over idea, the assumption of a somewhat called man, who is imperfect and who must be reconstructed, is untenable.
