Man is totally innocent, free of guilt and disease. Some people might meet this assertion with emphatic denial, or at least a raised eyebrow. Even so, spiritual man's total innocency as the expression of God is a leading point in the teaching and practice of Christian Science.
It might be well to state what innocency is not as well as what it is. It is not credulous naïveté; it is the purity of heart that spontaneously affiliates with reality. Innocency is not a superficial glossing over, or condoning, of wrong, but genuine response to hidden virtue. Although guilelessness is native to God's real, spiritual man, humanly it needs to be loved and developed.
Dictionaries generally define innocency as freedom from guilt or fault. As understood in Christian Science, innocency is associated with the very highest human name on earth, that of Christ Jesus, who exemplified the true nature of man as the offspring of God. Of him, John the Baptist cried, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." John 1:29:
