SCIENCE AND HEALTH tells us (p. 521) that "the harmony and immortality of man are intact. We should look away from the opposite supposition that man is created materially, and turn our gaze to the spiritual record of creation." The revelation of Truth, given through Mrs. Eddy's teachings, not only enables mortals to turn away from the false sense of creation to the true, but helps each one to realize in his own life and experience the incoming of the new heaven and the new earth, of which we read in the last chapters of the Apocalypse. This new heaven and new earth are really the old heaven and the old earth, the only heaven and the only earth that ever was or ever will be; and here we find God the sole cause and controller of all that exists, and man His spiritual image and likeness.
Perhaps there has been no greater opposition to any teaching of Christian Science than that centered upon the statement of the spiritual origin of man; and yet in the false material thought of creation inheres all sin, sickness, and death. The teaching of Christian Science on the subject of God as Spirit and the only source of all that is, including man, should not so disturb mortals, when this teaching rightly understood results in establishing peace, joy, health, and life eternal, which all mankind are instinctively and lawfully seeking.
The new heaven and the new earth become our heritage when we forsake the old way of thinking and living for the better means and methods which the writings of our Leader reveal to us. Mrs. Eddy makes it plain that the true man is the child of the one Father-Mother, divine Love, and has no other parentage than that infinite Spirit, divine Mind, eternal Truth, we call "our Father which art in heaven," and from whom there can be no separation: spiritual fatherhood, spiritual sonship.
