The Bible assures us that God is Love. Man, made in God's image and likeness, therefore embodies the invariable laws of Love, which never fail. Man's true consciousness reflects only what Love is forever knowing, and his motives and activities are inspired and governed by Love alone. Thus real identity cannot drift or be forced outside the infinite realm of Love. It is forever spiritual and intact.
The false concept of man as a mortal subject to sin, disease, and death, is what the Apostle Paul referred to as "the old man." We must put off this false sense of identity for "the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." Col. 3:9, 10. The mortal sense of self always yields to a spiritual understanding of man—the ideal man to whom God gave dominion over all the earth.
This understanding can be gained through study of the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, especially the life of Christ Jesus. Here, Science and Health sheds great light upon the Master's dual nature. It tells us, for example: "The invisible Christ was imperceptible to the so-called personal senses, whereas Jesus appeared as a bodily existence. This dual personality of the unseen and the seen, the spiritual and material, the eternal Christ and the corporeal Jesus manifest in flesh, continued until the Master's ascension, when the human, material concept, or Jesus, disappeared, while the spiritual self, or Christ, continues to exist in the eternal order of divine Science, taking away the sins of the world, as the Christ has always done, even before the human Jesus was incarnate to mortal eyes." Science and Health, p. 334.
