If God is the All, whence comes mortal mind? The All plus mortal mind would give us more than the All. God cannot be the all unless he is immortal and mortal mind at the same time. It is true that Mrs. Eddy denies reality to mortal mind. By mortal mind she means false beliefs about God and man. But how did false beliefs originate in a universe where God or Good is the only reality?
Mrs. Eddy's efforts to make room for mortal mind in her perfect world are really amusing, as will be seen by what follows.
Man is defined as "God's spiritual idea, individual, perfect, eternal" (p. 115). She explains further that, while man is not God, he is nevertheless made in God's image, and is therefore God-like. The distinction between God and man, according to Mrs. Eddy, is one of quantity and not of quality. Jesus Christ was not God, she writes; he was only "the ideal of God, now and for ever, here and everywhere" (p. 361). It is true Jesus said, "I and my father are one"; but, explains Mrs. Eddy, what is meant is one in quality, not in quantity. Jesus was God in the sense that a drop of water is the ocean, or a ray of light is the sun—in essence, not in size. In that sense man too is God, or a little god. Both man and Jesus possess all the qualities of divinity, but in limited proportions.
"The science of being," our prophetess goes on to say, "reveals man as perfect, even as the Father is perfect, because the Soul and Mind of the spiritual man is God" (p. 302), but in quality only, since "man is in a degree as perfect as the Mind that forms him" (p. 337). It follows that if man were God-like in quantity as well as in quality—that is, if he were not undersized or underweighted spiritually, there would have been no mortal mind, and therefore no sin or sickness in the world. But who clipped man's divinity, or made him an underling? In a perfect world how does man happen to be a dwarf?
Forgetting her own statement, that man is not so "bulky" as God, Mrs. Eddy insists that, as there is no error or sickness in God, there can be none in man, who is "God's spiritual idea." Yet, in order to justify Christian Science healing, she is compelled to make a further distinction between God and man. God is one, but there are two kinds of men—the spiritual and the mortal, and it is the latter who need the high-priced services of healers.
"God is not corporeal... mortals are corporeal" (p. 116).
If we ask Mrs. Eddy how man could possess a body and yet be "the reflection of God," who is incorporeal, she replies that this body of which she speaks is only a make-believe body; the real man is all soul, as is the Deity. "The description of man as both material and spiritual... is the Pandora box from which all ills have gone forth. Matter is a fiction" (pp. 170-1). From which it follows that man is as incorporeal as God; but the former thinks he has a body, and hence the sufferings from which the Deity is immune. "Mistaking his origin and nature, man believes himself to be combined matter and spirit" (p. 171). This, Mrs. Eddy considers, is as great an absurdity as to think of Christ as both God and Devil (Belial and Christ). How, then, did man come to have a body? He has none; he has only come to think he has one. And how did that happen? "The human mortal mind, by an inevitable perversion, makes all things start from the lowest." That is the way, according to the author of Science and Health, in which man came to believe in matter. This false belief is "mortal mind" (pp. 172-89), the Dragon which the St. George of New England offers to slay for what she considers a moderate price.
Let it be observed that Mrs. Eddy attributes the existence or the belief in the existence of "mortal mind" to the "inevitable perversion" of the human mind. Mark the use of the word "inevitable." Does she mean that "mortal mind"—that is to say, sin, suffering, and death—were predestined? If she does not mean that, what made man's departure from truth, or his "perversion," inevitable? Was there another power, greater than the All, who pulled man down into error? And how can Christian Science, if it could not prevent the "perversion" which called into existence the worst of all as well as the parent of all diseases—"mortal mind"—be a remedy against the innumerable ills which flow from it?
In pronouncing "mortal mind" or the "perversion" which called it into existence inevitable, Mrs. Eddy has virtually created a power greater than her "All in All," since the latter could not prevent the catastrophe.
Once more: the reply that man is God-like in every respect except in size, and that the body is a myth, does not help Mrs. Eddy's argument in the least. Real or unreal, the human body, or the belief in it, which causes so much suffering, should have no place in a system founded upon the dogmatic declaration that all is Mind, and all is Good, and all is God. The question remains: Why did Mrs. Eddy make room in this perfect universe for the serpent—mortal mind? As already suggested, without this false belief in materiality Christian Science would have been a useless discovery. Mrs. Eddy was debarred by her creed from admitting the existence of matter; hence she compromised on "a belief in matter," which works just as great a havoc as real matter. This arrangement has given to her army of Christian Science practitioners many (imaginary) ills to heal. Like Don Quixote, Christian Scientists to-day go forth to do battle, even though for enemies they have nothing more formidable than windmills. Physicians treat what they believe to be real maladies; Christian Scientists combat maladies which they say do not exist—that is to say, they fight phantoms.