Christian Science teaches that God created all that is, namely the spiritual universe, including man, and that as stated in the first chapter of Genesis (verse 31), "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Furthermore, it is stated in this chapter of the Bible that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him."
These statements of absolute truth flood the thought of the earnest inquirer with questions as to what is the nature and character of God and of man. With the light which Christian Science throws upon the deep and seemingly hidden truths of God and His creation, the student of this Science quickly discerns that there is a satisfying and demonstrable answer to all such questions. He learns of God as Spirit, Mind, Love, and as perfect; of a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. Through logical reasoning and divine revelation there is unfolded to thought the great spiritual fact that man reflects, that is to say, he images God in all of God's perfect nature, essence, and wholeness.
The student thus begins the mental and spiritual journey toward an understanding of the wondrous truths of God and man and of man's oneness, or unity, with God. He sees with the higher and clearer light of inspiration the truth that because God is perfect, man and the universe must needs be perfect also. He sees furthermore that all evil, sin, sickness, disease, poverty, lack, sorrow, suffering, and death are but illusions occasioned by a false concept of Life and of creation, including man. Practitioners of Christian Science realize when patients come to them suffering from sin or disease that the greatest need is to awaken these distressed ones to the spiritual fact of man as a son of God, even God's own image.
Christ Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, which is recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel, illustrates how one under the mesmerism of erroneous processes of thought may come to think of himself not as an image of God, but as a mortal, separated from his Father-Mother God. It is this false concept of man which the Christian Science practitioner seeks to obliterate from a patient's thought. The elimination of the false concept brings about regeneration and healing or what is called in Christian Science terminology a demonstration.
Briefly, the story of the prodigal is that of a young man, the younger son of a rich father, who asked his father to divide the inheritance and give him his portion. Whereupon the son went into a far country and "wasted his substance with riotous living." Then he began to experience want and poverty and even had to eat the husks which were intended for the swine. But "when he came to himself," he arose and returned to his father, humble and repentant. He found a most loving reception and was reinstated in the home of his parent.
In our present era we hear and see much of what is known as "the conservation of natural resources." Waste lands here and there are being reclaimed. Reforestation projects are preparing for the needs of future generations with the seeding and planting of millions of acres in trees for timber and other needs. Streams and rivers are being dammed to produce hydroelectric power and to irrigate lands for the raising of crops.
Now the opposite of conservation may be classified as wastefulness—a characteristic of a spendthrift or a prodigal. Prodigality does not necessarily mean drunkenness and carousing. It does mean a scattering unwisely of one's resources.
Spiritually considered, we can understand how such dissipating of supply would accompany a false concept of life. This false concept tends to shut one out of the Father's house, the kingdom of heaven. When the Master, Christ Jesus, declared, "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30), he made a pronouncement which embraces the very highest status of man. Man, the image or reflection of God, is one with God, as the ray of light is one with the sun. We know that a sun's ray cannot be severed from its source, the sun. Neither can man, in reality, separate himself from God, his source or creator. As sons and daughters of the loving Father-Mother God, we are dwellers now in the Father's house and are heirs of the abundant wealth of spiritual, God-given ideas all around us.
As our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 5), "Wholly apart from this mortal dream, this illusion and delusion of sense, Christian Science comes to reveal man as God's image, His idea, coexistent with Him—God giving all and man having all that God gives."
Like the prodigal, mankind wander away from awareness of man's unity with God. They go into a far country—not a place or locality, but a state of mortal-mindedness a mesmeric state. They then lose sight of man's perfection as God's sons and daughters. They become prodigals; that is, they begin to waste their spiritual resources, to scatter divine ideas, to throw them away, as it were, in riotous living. "Riotous" does not necessarily mean "carousing" and "drunkenness," any more than "prodigality" does. A riot may be a disturbance, "a state of confusion," or an assembly which is not in accordance with law. Before one comes into Christian Science, his thought is often disturbed, fearful, confused, and in a state which is not in accordance with divine law. He is in a far country, in the Adam-dream of separateness from the Father. The term "riotous living" is a perfect description of what he is doing: living in a state of confusion, fear, and the belief of lack. He is eating the husks, and not the spiritual food from the bountiful table of his Father.
Mrs. Eddy teaches us that we are not material personalities, combinations of good and evil, truth and error, mind and matter. This is the false concept of man. We arrive at a place where we have had enough of that false sense of life and are glad to come back to the arms of the Father. Our Leader writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 322): "The sharp experiences of belief in the supposititious life of matter, as well as our disappointments and ceaseless woes, turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love. Then we begin to learn Life in divine Science."
"When he came to himself." That was the point of the prodigal's awakening. When we catch the first faint gleams of spiritual light, we become aroused from the Adam-dream of life in matter. Then the human consciousness begins to separate the belief of evil from true selfhood, and one sees the error of having believed himself to be a dual personality, combined of truth and error, matter and spirit, good and evil, and as separated—away from God—in a far country. One realizes that he has been living in a state of false belief and not of divine reality.
What significance is in that resolve of the prodigal, "I will arise and go to my father"! He lifted his thought upward. Not only did he arise out of that mental depression, but he went to the Father. To many of us has come a similar experience. We may have been on a bed of sickness or simply at a place in our lives where we were bereft of joy and peace and happiness. But the experience had the effect of mesmerizing us into believing ourselves to be in a far country, away from all that is good, away from our Father-Mother God. In our distress we may have heard the tender voice of some consecrated practitioner telling us of God's love for us, or we may have read in the illumined Scriptures that "now are we the sons of God" (I John 3:2) or read in our loved textbook that divine Love will meet our need. When we have about-faced and have found the way through Christ, Truth, we have learned that our health, our harmony, and our supply have never been less than infinite.
We have been lost in a material sense of life, and we have found rescue in divine Science. We may say, as did the father to the elder son in the parable of the prodigal, "It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad."
