Since God is infinite Principle, the only power, He cannot be influenced, limited, or circumscribed. In recognition of this fact, in her definition of Mind, Mrs. Eddy refers, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 591), to "Deity, which outlines but is not outlined." From this it follows that man, created in the image of God, must reflect or express God's purpose, outline, or plan in all of its multitudinous forms of beauty, goodness, and perfection.
It is recorded in the first chapter of Genesis that God gave man "dominion over ... all the earth." What constituted this dominion? It could not have been the power to rule or dominate through any will apart from His; it could not have included any element emanating from a finite sense. Then was it not the power, derived or reflected from God, intelligently to express the divine purpose through the understanding which is the spiritual and essential quality of God? In Genesis we find God's decree that the firmament "divide the waters from the waters." Thus it is the mission of spiritual understanding to reveal the spiritual facts of God and man, and thereby to separate between the real and the unreal.
We find this power of spiritual illumination or understanding revealed throughout the successive chapters of the Bible. The thoughts of Moses and of the prophets were raised into the realm of clear spiritual vision through this impartation from the divine Mind. In the New Testament this God-bestowed understanding is called the Holy Ghost. It illumined the consciousness of the Virgin Mary, of Christ Jesus, and of the disciples. It raised St. John to that exalted plane of spiritual consciousness where he beheld "a new heaven and a new earth." And in our day we receive the Holy Ghost, or spiritual understanding, through the revelation of divine Science. And does not this Science give an understanding of the will of God? And what is the will of God but the power of good, the eternal law of divine Principle, creating and governing its infinite spiritual ideas expressed in man and the universe?
