The surest and quickest way— indeed, the only way—to obtain release from the limitation, the suffering, the sin, sickness, and death which attend a material or corporeal sense of existence is to attain that understanding of man's true spiritual existence to which Mary Baker Eddy refers, when she writes on page 13 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God's image or reflection and of man's eternal incorporeal existence."
It must be evident to all who have given the question serious consideration that the pains as well as the so-called pleasures of mortal existence are due to the belief that man is a corporeal person, rather than an incorporeal idea. The discordant experiences of human existence may, almost without exception, be traced to the belief that man is a material organism with a mind inside of it, instead of being spiritual, the image and likeness of God, Spirit, Mind.
However, to say that God, or divine Mind, is incorporeal is not to say or to mean that He is without embodiment or expression. In fact, a dictionary definition of "incorporeal" is: "Not having a material body or form" (Webster). It is obvious that God, Spirit, could not have a material body or finite form. It should be equally plain that God, being Mind, infinite consciousness, must have limitless manifestation or expression as thought. The infinite manifestation, image, or reflection of divine Mind is Mind's embodiment, Mind's universe of spiritual ideas. This infinite expression of Mind, Spirit, Soul, this spiritual universe, including all that exists by way of true thoughts or spiritual ideas, may be rightly referred to as the body or embodiment of Mind. And this infinite, invisible, universal, spiritual body, or embodiment of ideas, is the only real body. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, "There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling."
