One of the emphatic purposes of Christ Jesus' ministry was to present to humanity the foundations of a real and abiding peace, a genuine joy in living. Christian Science, in the footsteps of the Master, challenges and destroys the errors of material sense, such as sorrow, hatred, sin, disease, and limitation, which belittle true manhood and confine happiness to mortal events and material arrangements. This Science teaches that God and His creation constitute the only reality and that mankind can learn to live with the real only.
To live with the spiritually real, the Godlike, is to enjoy living. All that is truly right and worthy in human experience supports the conditions described in the first chapter of the Bible (Gen. 1:1, 31): "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." The spiritually real is eternally right, and both inspiration and scientific reasoning lead to this conclusion. Scientific Rightness characterizes the nature of man, the man who is not a mortal or subject to mortality, but who is the image of God, that is, the ideal of manhood.
Much of the spiritually ideal is expressed, or at least hinted at, in human experience. Human experience is ideal to the degree that it is transformed by spiritual understanding. The transformation from the material to the spiritual sense of existence can be enjoyed whether it is forced upon us by bitter experience or is gained through our free choice of good.
