Genesis, the record of spiritual creation. It is introduced into the second and following chapters, when the spiritual sense of God and infinity were disappearing to the writer's thought, — when the scientific statements of the Scriptures became clouded, through a physical sense of God as finite and personal. From this followed idolatry and mythology, belief in many gods, or material intelligences, as the opposite of the one Spirit or Intelligence, named Elohim, or God.
Man. The infinite idea of Infinite Spirit; the spiritual
image and likeness of God; the full representation of
Mind; the idea of Principle, not person; the compound
idea of God, including all other ideas; the generic term
for all that reflects God's image and likeness; the
conscious identity of being, as found in Science, where man
is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal;
that which has no separate mind from God; that
which has not a single quality underived from Deity;
that which possesses no life, intelligence, or creative
power of his own, but reflects all that belongs to his
Maker.
And God said: “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Gen. i. 26.)
Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death, inasmuch as he derives his essence from God, and possesses not a single original or underived power. Hence man cannot depart from holiness. Nor can God, by whom man was evolved, engender a capacity or freedom to sin. In
