In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 478), Mary Baker Eddy says that "man is coexistent with God." A growing awareness of this coexistence, revealing more of the essence of divinity, enriches human life with the nature and quality of divine Life, God. It brings increasingly into human consciousness a stimulus which divine Mind alone can impart, lessening every phase of discord connected with the belief in material existence.
Many mortals are unhappy and dissatisfied. Even those who seem to have every human requirement for happiness often feel that much is lacking. Is this not because they have accepted the material sense of life, with its beliefs of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death, instead of the true concept of Life as God? Attempting to build permanently on this false foundation leads to one disappointment after another, until mortals are driven, by the necessity of saving themselves from misery, to turn wholly to God.
At this point, many have become students of Christian Science. As one progresses in the understanding of this Science, one becomes aware of his coexistence with God, and sees that, by virtue of this coexistence alone, every need is met. Whereas he previously considered something external to himself, some material condition or relationship, indispensable to happiness, he now sees that all good unfolds from spiritual thinking. According to the Gospel of Luke, Christ Jesus said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Yet how persistently mortals look for this kingdom, this consciousness of harmony, elsewhere! They are prone to cling to their preconceptions, their educated, inherited, and acquired beliefs about life, home, family, friendship, attempting merely to make these material concepts harmonious, whereas the true way is to let them give place to the understanding of life as spiritual, as the reflection of divine Life.
