On page 465 of the Christian Science textbook, ''Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy defines God as follows: "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth. Love." Since God is infinite, He can never be included in anything which is not all-inclusive. How, then, is one to know the incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite God? Only by His manifestation. This manifestation, we learn in Christian Science, is the Christ, the perfect idea of God, the divine image and likeness, which was demonstrated by the man Jesus. This divinity of Jesus was his spiritual selfhood, the nature or reflection of God, the Saviour from sin, sickness, and death.
In the seventeenth chapter of John we read. "Now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." In this statement Jesus was looking beyond what seemed to be his mortal selfhood to his real spiritual identity as the Son of God, which had existed from the beginning. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science states in Science and Health (p. 14), "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth." Was it not to this divine Life that Jesus was referring, the Life which had been eternally his by reflection?
To Christ Jesus, material so-called existence was never the reality of being any more than our sleeping dreams are real. To him Life was God, ever-present and all-inclusive Being, eternally unfolding His own perfection without beginning or end, birth or death. He knew, further, that the real man is the expression of this Life. This understanding was the basis of his wonderful demonstrations, and enabled him to walk on the water, feed the multitude, and finally to raise himself from the dead. By these so-called miracles Jesus gave evidence of his abiding unity with God, divine Principle, a unity which he indicated in the passage from John already quoted.
