Only the life and individuality which are eternal are real, Christian Science teaches. Accordingly this Science constantly turns thought away from temporal matter and material selfhood, wherein mortal life is identified, to the immortality of God, self-existent Mind, and the equally immortal nature of Mind's expression, spiritual man. It shows the individual that in proportion to the understanding he gains of life and man as spiritual and eternal, he finds freedom from mortality's woes— unhappiness, sickness, and sin.
God is commonly regarded as being eternal. Creation and man are commonly thought to be temporal. How an eternal cause produces a temporal effect is unexplained, because unexplainable—in fact, impossible. What has led mortals to accept as real the conditions of mortality is the testimony of the material senses arguing that all we can see, hear, and feel is mortal, and therefore the mortal scene must be the real, even though it cannot logically derive from the eternal cause, everlasting Mind.
Christian Science challenges the claim of the material senses that what is materially seen, heard, and felt is the real. It starts its reasoning with God, eternal Mind, and deduces that the effect of eternal Mind, its universe of limitless ideas, is of the substance of eternal Mind, and is as eternal as the Mind it evidences. Individual man is included in Mind's universe, is one of Mind's ideas, coexistent with the divine intelligence that is the Life and substance of all its ideas.
