There are many ways of viewing things; perhaps as many ways as there are individual perceptions and opinions. Yet the law of God, Christian Science, reveals a uniquely spiritual perspective, transcending human viewpoints. When brought to all of the practical affairs of human life, this standpoint has a powerful transforming, redeeming, and healing effect.
Such is the metaphysical perspective that begins with God as the perfect creator of His perfect, spiritual creation. This standpoint also acknowledges that everything real, all that is true, proceeds from and expresses the creative power and activity of God. The spiritual perspective of reality, in acknowledging that God, divine Mind, is pure, perfect, and complete, consequently recognizes that God's manifestation, Mind's idea—His man—is likewise pure, perfect, and complete. That is the nature of "image and likeness," which identifies man's eternal relation to God. God is Spirit; man is spiritual. Divine reality, therefore, necessarily excludes matter, with its inherent limitations, discords, and mortality. Matter and materiality have no substance or place in God's kingdom, the realm of Spirit. Man is not material; creation is not material. The absolute truth affirms that all creation is in and of God, divine Mind, infinite Spirit—that all creation can only be spiritual, that all is good.
How does this relate to our human lives, our bodies, our institutions? Is this vision of reality too ethereal or transcendent? Does it make our present experience merely a valueless and meaningless myth? It's worth repeating that the effect of realizing the truth of God and man is not that we are abandoned to fanciful ramblings or removed to some remote nether world. Rather, this realization transforms us, redeems and heals us, gives to life a new beauty, promise, and holiness. This evidences the embrace of the human condition by the loving, saving law of God. As individual human consciousness is spiritualized, brought into line with the reality and activity of the divine consciousness, one's life is naturally uplifted, liberated. We discover meaning and purpose. We know the joy of Christly living and being. The same is true for our institutions, including our churches.
