IN the first chapter of Genesis, God is revealed as the only creator. In the same chapter man is declared to be made in God's image, reflecting His dominion over all the earth. Man is the generic term for all of God's ideas, the full reflection of Spirit. Since God is one, infinite and indivisible, man, God's idea, is not divisible. But generic man, the infinite idea of Spirit, while remaining one, includes all the individual expressions of Mind. Thus each individual idea individually reflects its divine source, Spirit, and this individual reflection constitutes its individuality and identity. The sun and its innumerable rays illustrate this relationship, each ray having its distinctive identity, while reflecting the nature of the sun, and all rays collectively representing the sun in its entirety.
In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy states (p. 507), "The universe of Spirit reflects the creative power of the divine Principle, or Life, which reproduces the multitudinous forms of Mind and governs the multiplication of the compound idea man." Numbers may be multiplied ad infinitum, but nothing is added to the originals, which remain perfect and complete. It is so in the revelation of Christian Science, where the reality of all things is unfolded progressively to the receptive individual consciousness and made practical in human experience.
The pure light of divine Science shows it to be impossible for individual spiritual man to have any beginning, or ending, for he has no existence other than as the son of God. Our Master commands that we shall not call any human being by the name of father, since God is the only creator or Father of man. The term man scientifically belongs only to the children of God and can never rightly be applied to mortals. The carnal counterfeit of man is the human concept, which is but a mortal illusion, wholly unrelated to God and man, having no real origin, identity, or history.
