The seeming cause of every ill that afflicts mankind is the belief of separation from God, the only source and substance of good. That this belief can be corrected and the ills of mankind eradicated is the teaching of Christian Science. Its Discoverer and Founder, Mary Baker Eddy, admonishes us on page 91 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" : "Let us rid ourselves of the belief that man is separated from God, and obey only the divine Principle, Life and Love." Where shall we begin to correct and thus rid ourselves of the belief of separation from God? Why, in the beginning, of course. We must begin with God, Spirit, rather than with Adam, or matter. It is an interesting thing to note that almost every farce that has been written for the stage has been written around a case of mistaken identity. So we find that what seems to be the farce of mortal existence is based on a false sense of origin, on mistaken identity. Mortals believe themselves to have been born of matter, to be imprisoned in matter, dependent on matter, and subject to matter, with all its false laws and illusions.
The belief of separation from God results in the belief that one has a material body of his own in which he lives and moves and has his being separated from the creative Principle, Life and Love. What is this material body, too ponderous or too tenuous, young or old, sick or well, ugly or beautiful? Mrs. Eddy says on page 416 of Science and Health, "The material body, which you call me, is mortal mind, and this mind is material in sensation, even as the body, which has originated from this material sense and been developed according to it, is material." Then to correct a false sense of separation from divine Mind it is necessary to correct or to put off the false concept of mortal mind, called the physical body.
Mortal mind has never been intelligent about its concept of body. It creates its body out of perishable stuff; it believes it can be discordant, diseased, old, disintegrating. It is convinced that its destruction is inevitable, then spends its time trying to preserve that body as matter, trying to prevent or at least postpone as long as possible what it believes to be inevitable. One's effort should be not to preserve matter but to glorify Spirit, whose perfection is reflected in and transforms one's human living in the proportion that it constitutes his consciousness.
