Mary Baker Eddy defines man on page 475 of our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," in part as "the conscious identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker."
Christian Science is the revelation of being. It reveals what actually is and always has been, and reveals that it is good. It shows conversely that what has generally been believed to be, has never been going on at all, but is merely a dream—a fantastic and wholly erroneous sense of reality.
If all Christian Science did were to make us nicer human beings and to bring a little more harmony into our human existence, we would naturally be thankful for it, but it would then be just another philanthropic endeavor and could claim no more right to our attention than any other system which has the improvement of human conditions for its aim. Christian Science does accomplish much for the alleviation of suffering and the uplift of humanity, yet its main purpose is not the relief of human woe. The primary mission of Christian Science is to reveal the unity of being, the inseparability of God and man, divine Mind and idea, and the correlative fact that human nature is not the real nature of man at all, but that man's nature is Godlike. The proper use of Christian Science is not to build up personality or to exalt the "old man," but from the point of view of infinite individuality to let the facts of true identity remove the mask of personality. Christian Science has come to show us how to "put off the old man," the kind of person that we seem to be, in order that the son of God, our true identity, complete and utterly satisfying, may be recognized and claimed as man.
