"Oh, but you are not being realistic!" One may occasionally find himself challenged by such a remark as this because of his refusal to accept as real some inharmonious or afflictive testimony presented by the five mortal senses; in other words, because he refuses to compromise with error. Obviously the maker of such a remark does not understand the teachings of Christian Science. He may be prompted to make it because he is irked by one's refusal, as a Christian Scientist, to resort to material means as a remedy for some, illness or some other inharmony.
Such a refusal, however, is made in strict conformity with the teachings of Christian Science, which make clear that good and evil, Spirit and matter, cannot both be true. A Christian Scientist fully accepts the fact that God, the only and all-good creator of man and the universe, could not and did not create anything but good, and that He created man in His own image and likeness, as the Scriptures so plainly state (Gen. 1:27, 31): "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Therefore the Scientist is convinced that whatever appears in human experience as harmful and destructive is unreal and nonexistent.
The dual nature of mortal mind, which accepts as real both good and evil, Spirit and matter, finds no place in the inspired revelation of Truth, which Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has given to this age. With the assurance, certainty, and directness so characteristic of her statements of truth she points out the mistake of such a position, and the unhappy results that it brings, when she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 216): "The great mistake of mortals is to suppose that man, God's image and likeness, is both matter and Spirit, both good and evil. If the decision were, left to the corporeal senses, evil would appear to be the master of good, and sickness to be the rule of existence, while health would seem the exception, death the inevitable, and life a paradox."
