BE ye holy; for I am holy," is the command of God recorded by Moses and authoritatively reiterated by the Apostle Peter. This divine edict is God's direct statement to man of the glorious fact of his being, related in the first chapter of Genesis, that man is the image and likeness of God. This imperious command, this gracious gift, was in the beginning bestowed upon God's greatly beloved idea, man. Man is now and always under the loving sovereignty of this divine command, for the gift has never been taken from him, nor can it be.
Unity is precious. It is man's sacred relationship—his oneness with God, as the perfect image and likeness of his Maker. Thus unity is eternally inviolate. In its holy purity it is protected from even the faintest shadow of materiality. Christ Jesus proclaimed his full realization of oneness with God in the words, "I and my Father are one." He thus proclaimed his own spiritual identity; and in his office of pointing the way, he has shown that man's identity is established, sustained, and maintained through his identification with God, Spirit.
The absolute truth of being has been stated by Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468), in the scientific declaration that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." Assent to suggestion of reality in an illusory opposite of this supreme truth has seemed to deprive man of his identity, his spiritual identification with the All-in-all. Such seeming deprivation has no substance, and it has no place except as an illusion in mortal mind, itself equally mythical.
