"Few there are who comprehend what Christian Science means by the word reflection," says Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in her article "One Cause and Effect" in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 23). And in an illustration on page 515 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she points out that the image or reflection in a mirror has no originality or existence apart from the object which it reflects. The reflection can move or change only as the original changes, but the mirrored reflection faithfully and perfectly repeats or reflects its original. Applying this object-lesson to the relation of God to man in divine Science, our Leader makes it clear that, since there is only one cause, man can be only God's reflection or image.
The process whereby selfishness gives place to the meekness and power of God's reflection, man, is one of ceaseless prayer and fasting from material-mindedness. In this work of patient and persistent overcoming of all within one's mentality that contradicts God's perfectness, one must assuredly come to that point of experience where he humbly and gratefully realizes that man is effect, not cause. Divine Science demands that thought shall steadily, but meekly and lovingly, abandon the human material sense of self. It must cease from obstructing or contradicting the one Mind, the one and only cause.
Is it not obvious that the reason why so few understand what Christian Science means by the word "reflection" is that so few keep the First Commandment and faithfully adhere in life-practice to the scientific and metaphysical fact that the only Mind is God, and that man has no intelligence of his own apart from God? Such obedience must spring from a loving and spiritual perception of the claims of the One "altogether lovely," altogether wise, altogether good. Christian Science reveals great rewards for him who abandons fear and human so-called will, and who meekly opens his heart to receive of God's great abundance. To reflect God demands complete and continual denial of the pride and fear which obstinately hold to their false sense of possession. Such denial Jesus referred to as a condition of discipleship when he said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me."
