Limitation is a belief in an existence apart from God, Spirit, a belief that Spirit's supposed opposite, matter, has intelligence, substance, life, and that it can give, or withhold, something essential to health, happiness, and well-being. Limitation is put off and true substance appears in proportion as we seek the eternal facts of being and conform our thoughts and efforts to the demonstration of divine Principle. The divine admonition is, "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." As thought is brought into conscious harmony with spiritual Truth, one finds himself growing more happy, healthy, and free.
"A belief in other gods, other creators, and other creations must go down before Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy declares on page 535 of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." God's creation consists of pure, perfect, and enduring spiritual ideas. These ideas emanate from God, divine Mind, and exist only in the Mind conceiving them. They are as eternal and indestructible as their source.
The seeming purpose of evil, the supposititious opposite of infinite good, is to substitute its distorted concepts of creation for God's ideas, and to repeat these misconceptions materially. But God made the universe, including man, subject only to the operation of spiritual law. Evil, good's supposed opposite, claims to have made the universe, including mortal man, as matter, and consequently subject to the mutations and limitations of so-called material law. When we consider creation as the reflection of Spirit, or as spiritual ideas dwelling forever in the eternal Mind, we know these ideas to be whole, perfect, eternal, and indestructible; but when we accept the belief of creation as material we lose the vision of perfection, and mortals appear subject to chance, change, sin, disease, and death. God, infinite good, is the creating, governing divine Principle, immutable and eternal; and man is the reflection, manifestation, or expression of Deity, conscious of and including all right ideas and nothing else. Evil claims to present itself as substance, life, and intelligence in matter, as mortal man confined in and governed by a finite body. Thus matter may be considered as embodied evil.
