In the study and practice of their religion, Christian Scientists become not only selective as regards their thinking, but discriminating in the use of words. Our vocabularies are enlarged and refined as we study the words and imbibe the meaning of the writings of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. We find that although she uses words with clear perception as to their fundamental meanings, she uses them always in accord with the best accepted usage. Where, to clarify a metaphysical idea, she diverges from the general usage, she so indicates, and such special terminology is finding its way into standard reference works.
Every serious student of this Science will have had his own unfoldment as to our Leader's meaning when she repeatedly asserts in all her published writings that man is God's reflection. The writer's thought on this went through varying phases, during one of which "reflect" and "reflection" were used sparingly and other words frequently employed by Mrs. Eddy as descriptive of man—"expression," "manifestation," "witness"—were substituted. But the comment in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 301), that few people understand what Christian Science means by the word "reflection," was a challenge to him to be among those who do. There was no doubt of his accord with the basic Christianly scientific teaching that man is created in the image and likeness of God, as the author of Genesis perceived. He knew, too, from his study of Science that God is Spirit, Mind, and that man as Mind's manifestation is therefore altogether, not partially, spiritually mental.
"Generically man is one," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 267 of the textbook, "and specifically man means all men." So understanding, he had many years ago awakened from much of the bondage which a belief in matter's entity and substance imposes. He had seen how individual man reflects his divine origin in Godlike qualities—love, honesty, integrity, vitality, fruitful activity, spiritual intuition, and inspiration.
But there was something more to comprehend, something more satisfying to perceive. It came one day in consideration of Mrs. Eddy's rhetorical question and its unqualified answer in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 8): "As God made man, is he not wholly spiritual? The reflex image of Spirit is not unlike Spirit. The logic of divine metaphysics makes man none too transcendental, if we follow the teachings of the Bible." The reflex image! The phrase so often read before had suddenly become a key. A perusal of dictionary definitions of the various forms of the verb "reflect" shows that in every instance it signifies a turning back of something to its source, a relating of phenomenon, or effect, to its noumenon, or cause. In considering phenomena of the so-called physical universe, we have spontaneous evidence of this "relating of phenomenon, or effect, to its noumenon, or cause," as familiarly illustrated by the sun's rays reflecting their source in the solar qualities of color, light, heat, and energy. But real phenomena are not material symbols, but spiritual ideas, involving spiritual consciousness and divine volition.
We reflect God in the measure that we are consciously aware of our relationship to Him. Spiritual reflection not only expresses, or gives out, the divine qualities which constitute real being, but relates them back to their source. Thus in reflecting God we are expressing the infinite oneness and indivisibility of divine Being. To reflect God is to gladly give God the glory, to know Him as the source of all good, and to see, with Jesus, that "the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works" (John 14:10). As we reflect God, we are making manifest the Christ, for we are revealing the divine nature, with its promise of present and eternal fulfillment. Conscious reflection implies gratitude. Humility is a sign following. Healing is its fruitage.
No one will ever forget the moment when it first dawned upon him that all that really exists is Mind, Spirit, and its diversified and individualized manifestation; when he first discerned that man is an individual consciousness, deriving from God, as His reflection, every right idea to sustain and maintain him; that what appears to material sense to be man, in a material body, is but a false and temporal sense of that true embodiment of right ideas and divine qualities which constitutes man in God's likeness.
The consecrated student and practitioner of Christian Science are not helped by indulging in abstractions. If generic man seems remote and transcendental, we have failed somewhere to comprehend "the logic of divine metaphysics," which the Scriptures unfold, and to which Christian Science provides the key. The sublimity of generic man, the full manifestation of Mind, is enhanced when it is understood that he has infinite variety, diversity, and specific individuality.
It is comforting to know with John, in his first epistle, that even "now are we the sons of God." It is reassuring to recall that centuries before the beloved disciple wrote, Job had discerned that even in what appears to be the flesh, shall we "see God" (Job 19: 26). Faith is strengthened as it is perceived that God is ever revealing Himself to the receptive consciousness, and that we are aware of His presence as His nature is reflected in us. We are inspired to present demonstration of man's unity with God as we realize with our Leader that we are in truth the "immortal men and women" referred to in the glowing passage on page 247 of the textbook, where she writes, "Immortal men and women are models of spiritual sense, drawn by perfect Mind and reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness which transcend all material sense."
Nothing gives such strength as the awareness that our oneness with divine Being is inviolable and indissoluble, and that we do not need to wait for some future time to begin the demonstration of that relationship. We are demonstrating it each time we lift ourselves or others from beliefs of material sense into the apprehension of spiritual ideas as the only reality. At such moments we may join with the singer of the thirty-sixth Psalm, who so evidently glimpsed reflected being (verse 9): "With thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light."
