Such is the power of the recognition of man's inherent goodness that, even when glimpsed through the veil of materialism, it started a train of thought which led to revolutionary political ideals and an upheaval in the arts. But the eighteenth century philosophy of the perfectibility of man gave no hint of the unchanging basis of spiritual perfection, and consequently its effects were subject to human beliefs of perversion and reaction. It remained for the Discoverer and . Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, to give to the world the Science of being, which enables anyone to prove progressively man's freedom from every form of evil. This Science is destined to deliver all mankind from sin, sickness, and death.
Christian Science teaches that the perfectibility of man is not to be found in a material sense of being, but is realized only as thought is transformed and the spiritual takes the place of the human. On page 11 of "Christian Science versus Pantheism" Mrs. Eddy has written: "Mortals, content with something less than perfection—the original standard of man—may believe that evil develops good, and that whatever strips off evil's disguise belittles man's personality. But God enables us to know that evil is not the medium of good, and that good supreme destroys all sense of evil, obliterates the lost image that mortals are content to call man, and demands man's unfallen spiritual perfectibility."
Human ways and means for the improvement of mankind have all been based on the false theory of the man described in the second chapter of Genesis as having been created after a mist went up "from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground." Philosophy has declaimed against this man's weaknesses, theology has exhorted him to repent, and materia medica has attempted to heal him with drugs and serums. Such efforts have only beaten against the mist of materialism. They have not dispelled it. Christian Science, however, dispels it and reveals creation as the unfoldment of one divine Mind and its idea, man, as forever perfect and complete.
