In her principal work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy makes this arresting statement (p. 527): "Man is God's reflection, needing no cultivation, but ever beautiful and complete." And on another page of the same work she says (p. 202), "The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God's will must be universally done." A deduction easily made from these two statements is that the beauty and completeness of man, whom God creates and maintains, constitute the actual fact or truth regarding each individual and may be demonstrated or proved true.
In order to demonstrate a spiritual fact, spiritual perception or understanding must be developed to the extent that it not only overbalances the material sense testimony but subordinates it as unreality. Spiritual facts then take precedence in human consciousness, subduing and overcoming the clamor of the false material senses. Spiritual perception may come in a flash by revelation or it may come by a process of selectivity—the rejection of some thoughts and the retention of others. The basis of selectivity may be established by asking oneself. "Does this thought emanate from the divine Mind, or does it come from a supposititious mortal mind?"
The teachings of Christian Science declare God to be divine cause and man and the universe to be the effect of this cause. This effect—man and the universe—must be like its cause in nature, and Christian Science reveals both cause and effect to be wholly spiritual. It will be readily seen that neither this cause nor its effect includes any materiality. Unloveliness, lack, and inadequacy find no foothold in the realm of spiritual reality. Nothing can be added to the effect of this wholly spiritual cause, nor can anything be subtracted from it. It exists now in all its beauty, completeness, and usefulness with no need of cultivation or development. The beauty and completeness of man thus spiritually perceived become tangible and real to human consciousness, and their demonstration in human experience follows effortlessly.
