Christian Science defines God as divine, infinite, eternal, and omnipresent Principle, Mind, Life, Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul. By the use of these synonymous terms we discern more clearly the nature of God and what His infinite being includes. Accepting the Scriptural revelation that man is God's image and likeness, we discern that man expresses or reflects His qualities, even the divine nature.
The infinite divine Mind includes or embodies all the ideas that make up spiritual creation, and each idea expresses the infinitude, eternality, and omnipresence of Mind. Man in the likeness of God posesses, by reflection, these unlimited intelligent ideas, and this possession, or reflection, of spiritual ideas and qualities constitutes man's real embodiment or identity. God is Spirit, and man is an individual spiritual consciousness, reflecting the divine consciousness or infinite Mind. "There is one body, and one Spirit," we read in the fourth chapter of Ephesians.
Mortal mind, by its suppositional reversal of the divine, presents the theory that man lives in a finite, material body; that he is constituted of material organs instead of spiritual ideas. The common belief about man is that he is subject to material birth and death and all the intervening errors of sin, sickness, accident, age, and impairment. Belief in another mind than God and in its claim to material embodiment results in sin and suffering, the falsity from which mankind needs to be freed. Mary Baker Eddy uncovered this error when she discovered the truth of being. On page 223 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" she writes, "Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man's finite capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of in Soul, in matter instead of in Spirit."
