An individual's ideals reflect what he believes to be spiritually true. He who admits the absolute perfection of God and man will hold to correspondingly high ideals; while he who is under the illusion that sin or evil is a part of God and His creation will incline toward less lovely ideals. Mary Baker Eddy says in her book "No and Yes" (p. 38), "Having one God, one Mind, one consciousness,—which includes only His own nature,—and loving your neighbor as yourself, constitute Christian Science, which must demonstrate the nothingness of any other state or stage of being." Paul turns thought in the same direction when he says (Col. 3:1,2): "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth." This practical ideal underlies all genuinely scientific living, healing, and teaching.
Christian Science maintains this ideal by its consistency on the subject of the nature of God and man, made in His image, and by its insistence on the utter unreality of all that is unlike Him. The acknowledgment of the absolute perfection of divine Mind, God, and of His infinite manifestation, man and the universe, together with the denial of the validity of matter and its claims of mortality, is an antidote for all phases of mental, physical, or moral discord.
Some consider the spiritual ideal impractical. They believe that the application of these propositions of truth to individual experience is tantamount to looking at everything through rose-colored glasses, thereby failing to see the seriousness of troubles at hand. Nothing could be farther from the facts. The understanding of the truth of being is the most liberating influence that can reach the hearts of men; while belief in the reality of evil is the most enslaving.
