How frequently one carelessly accepts the offhand remark, "That's just like a woman," or, "Men are like that." Christian Science challenges such comments, which usually draw attention to unlovely characteristics, for it teaches that all undesirable traits are inversions of good and as such cannot be attached to spiritual man, who, we are told in the Bible, is God's offspring (Gen. 1:27): "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
This Science plainly reveals the falsity of attaching error, or evil, to person or attributing either masculine or feminine gender to it. It teaches also the healing grace of recognizing our true identity as eternally perfect and complete, because it is created in God's image and likeness. It explains the value of replacing material sense testimony with the just estimate of Spirit. On page 508 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy gives us the thought-arresting statement, "The intelligent individual idea, be it male or female, rising from the lesser to the greater, unfolds the infinitude of Love."
To acknowledge that we and our fellow beings are intelligent individual ideas created in the image of God frees us from the inharmonies of fraudulent material thinking. It makes possible an understanding of the unadulterated masculine and feminine qualities which man possesses; for as divine idea he forever reflects the fatherhood and motherhood of God. Such acknowledgment exposes the human masquerade of materiality and its frustration as false because they do not proceed from the divine Mind. The ideal man reflects this Mind in intelligence and perspicacity.
