The approach of Christian Science to the subject of sin is both unique and effective. This Science, based as it is upon the perfection of God and man and the consequent falsity of the mortal sense of existence, undermines the very foundation of evil. When the foundation is destroyed the structure of sin must crumble away. “When we deny the authority of sin, we begin to sap it; for this denunciation must precede its destruction,” writes the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, on page 63of “Retrospection and Introspection.”
Sin has no authority because it has no Principle, no God, to support it. Its existence is supposititious. In its broadest meaning, sin is the false mortal sense of existence. It is the carnal mind, which claims to embody itself in sinful fleshly mortals, in defiance of the fact that man is the immortal, spiritual offspring of Spirit, incapable of sin. Christian Science shows that to be rid of sinful tendencies, one must acknowledge the unreality of the entire dream of life in matter, must dissociate himself from it and awake to the true sense of self, which abides in Spirit. Man is not a sinner, and a sinful self represents only a state of delusion in which matter appears to have sensation and the gravitation of thought is earthward—away from the Godlike and the pure.
Man’s senses, so Christian Science reveals, are spiritual. They drink in the impressions of heaven—spiritual satisfaction, divine control, the fact of God’s ever-presence. It is in the bodily sense, not the spiritual, that sin inheres, and these senses mankind must recognize as counterfeits of the real and as no part of God’s man. They are the wolves in sheep’s clothing against which Christ Jesus warned, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:16). He saw them as sometimes prophesying good, but always producing evil.
