It is recorded in the Book of Genesis that the first son of the patriarch Abram, later called Abraham, was born to Hagar the bondmaid. This son typifies the concept of a mortal selfhood as comprised in the mistaken beliefs that man is a material entity which inhabits a physical body; that he suffers and enjoys according to what the senses claim he is feeling; and that he can be enslaved by these senses, since sometimes evil seems to be as real and as powerful as God, good.
The belief of intelligent matter, termed earlier in the Book of Genesis (2:17) "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," is the basis of mankind's woes. Everything afflictive in human experience can be traced to one form or another of such belief.
Christian Science, reasoning from the declaration in the first chapter of Genesis that God made man in His image—that is, in the image of Spirit—denies categorically that this man ever was or ever can be a physical concept. And it affirms that the image of Spirit does not inhabit a physical body, is not governed by physical so-called senses, was never born into matter, does not live in it, and therefore can never die out of it. Christian Science, acknowledging God to be infinite Mind, finds man to be the idea of that Mind, not material, but wholly spiritual.
