One can identify himself or others as God's image and likeness only by accepting Christ Jesus' identification of the son of God as spiritual and immortal. By an orderly succession of demonstrations of spiritual reality, including the healing of sickness and sin, the transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension, the Master proved that the identity of the children of God is entirely separate from and higher than any beliefs of life and soul in matter.
The Master did not point out a way impossible for others to follow and never told anyone that his ability to understand God, Spirit, and man in His image was restricted by so-called material laws, causes, and effects, or by any beliefs of temporal material existence. He told his immediate disciples that until the material sense of him vanished from their thoughts, they would not recognize the Comforter, the Christ, which, as Christian Science makes plain, means that one must spiritualize his thought and life by overcoming materiality in order to identify himself and others as God's spiritual ideas, and not as human beings.
The child of God can be identified only as God's reflection, Spirit's image and likeness. True individuality is never found in a material form; nor is it found in anything which purports to be a spiritual form but is vaguely patterned after material beliefs. When some of his disciples were misled by corporeal sense to propose a retaliatory act, Jesus reproved them by saying (Luke 9:55), "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." And Paul said (Rom. 9:8), "They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God." Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 287): "Error supposes man to be both mental and material. Divine Science contradicts this postulate and maintains man's spiritual identity." Mere human reasoning and speculation cannot comprehend man's spiritual identity and dominion.
