In answer to the question, "What are body and Soul?" Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 477), "Identity is the reflection of Spirit, the reflection in multifarious forms of the living Principle, Love."
A dictionary defines "identity" as "self-sameness; oneness" (Webster). Considered in connection with the assertion in Genesis that man is made in the image and likeness of God, together with the basic teaching of Christian Science that God and man are indivisibly one as Principle and idea, it will be seen that not human personality, but the selfsame spiritual qualities which characterize God identify man. Thus one who correctly understands Deity as Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, divine Principle, has a perfect pattern by which he may recognize man. Since God is reflected in nothing unlike His own nature, it is evident that all creation—everything that is real—must express sinless, inviolable Life and Love. Only that can have entity or identity which reflects harmony, loveliness, affluence, purity, perfection, completeness, integrity, eternality, and so on.
The Christian Scientist may gain this understanding of what constitutes and identifies man, the divine idea, so clearly that the manifestations of good which he sees in others will awaken in him not desire or envy, but a realization that these are present facts of his own being as man, the son of God. Likewise, he will accept as a challenge to his correct understanding of man, and therefore to his own true selfhood, those falsities which claim identity as sick, sinning, and dying mortals.
