Christian Science is the Science of self-completeness. It teaches that man is complete and perfect now. His forever function and perpetual purpose is to image forth the complete and perfect Father-Mother Mind, which is God. The abiding awareness of this great fact of our being constitutes for each one of us spiritual self-completeness.
Once only, in all her published writings, does Mary Baker Eddy employ the term "self-completeness." With her clear, characteristic phraseology she tells us on page 264 of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness." Our own recognition of Life as Spirit and of being as spiritual must expand. Expand into what? Into self-completeness and sufficiency that find nothing wanting, nothing lacking for the manifestation of present perfection here and now.
A number of years ago a student of Christian Science came face to face with a sudden and tragic sense of personal loss. This was fully and permanently healed when the truth that self-completeness finds "all in God, good," was perceived. Gratefully and joyously it was realized that the ceaseless symphony of Soul contains no incomplete chords, no missing notes, no broken melodies.
Everything we can ever really love in each other is included in the qualities and attributes of God, Mind, who is eternally All. The allness of God is never depleted or decimated; for God can never be less than All, nor can He ever fail to include and express all right ideas.
Since man reflects God, he too includes and expresses all right ideas, immortal attributes and characteristics, and can never be separated from any of them. Perceiving this truth, Paul wrote of the Christ (Col. 2:9, 10): "In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power." The "fulness of the Godhead," Mind, is not divisible, for then would it cease to be infinite. It is imaged forth by the complete, true selfhood of everyone as Mind's reflection.
Sensing the inadequacy of the so-called human mind and its need to find completeness and satisfaction beyond its own restricted borders, the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
... I smiled to think God's greatness flowed
around our incompleteness,—
Round our restlessness, His rest.
It is only the sense dream of man in the allegory of Adam and Eve told in the second and third chapters of Genesis that is troubled with any sense of incompleteness. The real and true man, made in the image and likeness of God, shows forth in everlasting completeness and harmony the qualities and attributes of his Father-Mother, Mind. He expresses with perfect equipoise the male and female of Spirit's own creating, and this divine expression carries with it all the tenderness and might, peace and joy, health and holiness, stillness and strength, of its source and cause.
This fact is fully brought out in the record of spiritual creation contained in the first chapter of Genesis. There man is seen to be God's complete reflection, without fault or flaw, defect or deficiency. Under the marginal heading "Infinity measureless," on page 519 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy moves to the conclusion of her remarkable exegesis of the true account of creation in the following words: "Thus the ideas of God in universal being are complete and forever expressed, for Science reveals infinity and the fatherhood and motherhood of Love."
In his demonstration of "infinity and the fatherhood and motherhood of Love," the great Way-shower, Christ Jesus, attained full and complete success through his healing works. It might be said that those who came to him for healing, whether their need was for release from bondage to sin or lack, deafness or blindness, dreaded leprosy or insanity, were all of them suffering from some sense of incompleteness.
How did Jesus meet their various needs? His own declaration provides the answer to such a question (John 10:10), "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly"— more completely! Then by his works he demonstrated his uncompromising recognition of man's completeness as perfect idea conceived by perfect Mind and including all right ideas—health, holiness or wholeness, harmony, immortality.
When Jairus brought the Master to the bedside of his little daughter, it was apparent that she was suffering from the inadequate sense of life held by those around her. Jesus "put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway" (Luke 8:54, 55). Her instant restoration to faultless functioning was evidence of her actual completeness as Mind's idea.
To the Master's clear vision, nothing was ever lacking in the completeness and perfectibility of God's conception of His own beloved offspring and idea, man. To infinite perfection, nothing has to be added or superimposed, and nothing can be taken away. Said the Preacher (Eccl. 3:14), "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him."
In this present day and age, Christian Science is again proclaiming the unassailable truth of man's complete perfection and perfect completeness in Soul, God, without possibility of deterioration, disease, or decay. Throughout the world Christian Science practitioners and others are proving the power of Science to heal all manner of disease and wrong conditions. This surely encourages one to look forward eagerly and expectantly to the total elimination and destruction of everything that does not contribute to mankind's complete health and harmony here and now.
We should never lose sight of the truth that man is not a human person struggling toward perfection. Rather is he an unfolding idea of divine Mind, expressing the complete and unlimited capacities of Life and Love and enjoying the uninhibited bliss of Godlikeness.
Each individual, then, can discover for himself his own self-completeness. This is never determined by what his human circumstances or relationships happen to be, whether husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter. Everyone can demonstrate day by day his completeness in God as His idea and find the full satisfaction that completeness brings.
Mrs. Eddy speaks of the trinity of the Godhead, Life, Truth, Love, in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901, and she says (p. 7): "Again, God being infinite Mind, He is the all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving Father-Mother, for God made man in His own image and likeness, and made them male and female as the Scriptures declare; then does not our heavenly Parent—the divine Mind—include within this Mind the thoughts that express the different mentalities of man and woman, whereby we may consistently say, 'Our Father-Mother God'? And does not this heavenly Parent know and supply the differing needs of the individual mind even as the Scriptures declare He will?"
