NO teaching of Christian Science is more beautiful and satisfying than that concerning man. The apostle John once wrote, "If a man say, I love God, "and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" and from the old point of view this seemed "an hard saying" indeed. It was a comparatively easy thing to love God, or at least to say we did, but to love our brother was an entirely different matter. In fact, when we took into consideration certain persons of our acquaintance, we felt the case to be as hopeless, perhaps, as did the little boy who said, "Mamma, when the minister said we must love our neighbor as ourselves, do you think he knew our neighbors?" And truly, if we were to look at poor weak humanity, dragging its useless burdens along life's highway, we might well despair if we thought we were required to love all that the material senses tell us of our brother.
Christian Science clearly differentiates, however, between mortals and man in God's image and likeness. It is the real man, spiritual and not material, whom we are to love if we would really love God. Indeed, since God and man are inseparable in Science, it is impossible to love one without loving the other. Can we know the sun from which light emanates without recognizing and rejoicing in the light which emanates from it? Indeed, as the light is the proof of the sun, so is man the expression of Mind, proof of that Mind, for Mind unexpressed is a self-evident impossibility.
Material sense, however, contradicts all this, and was busy contradicting it centuries before John leaned on Jesus' breast and learned from him man's unity with the Father. Material sense inverts the facts of being, and says that there is not only one kind of man, but two; and here old theology and Christian Science part company, for the belief in a dual creation would not only separate man from God, but would also separate a man from his brother. Jacob once had an experience which proved to him the fallacy of this mode of reasoning. His brother, Esau, with apparently just cause for wrath, was coming out against him with four hundred men; and when the news was brought to Jacob, he "was greatly afraid and distressed." He immediately proceeded to do the very worst thing he could have done, —and we, as Christian Scientists, may congratulate ourselves if we have never done likewise,—he divided his household "into two bands," which may fittingly symbolize a divided consciousness. He saw man not as one, but as two; not as wholly spiritual, but as both spiritual and material; and then his trouble began.
