Here are theological and ontological terms with which the present-day student of Christian Science is familiar, along with the sense of God as the Being in whom all else subsists, but the characteristic Christian Science concept of man has not yet emerged out of the shadow.

It is not merely that the word “shadow” is used where later Mrs. Eddy would describe man as reflection, expression, manifestation. In “The Science of Man” as a whole the overwhelming reality of God seems to make the very idea “man” shadowy and insubstantial in comparison. God is set forth clearly as the Principle of man, but man as the idea of God is still in the process of formation, of emergence into light. Consequently the student at that time was told to identify himself with God in what was sometimes misconstrued as a pantheistic sense. Later she would make it clear that he must identify himself as man, or manifestation, in order to identify himself with God, his divine source, as Jesus Christ had spoken of himself always as the son of God, not as God the Father.

This development and clarification of her teaching would follow naturally from the foundation laid down in “The Science of Man,” but the foundation itself is clear: God is the Principle of all that really exists. And here she at once ran into difficulty with traditional theology.

Again and again she insisted that God is not “personal.” It is evident that to her the words “person” and “personal” implied a human or physical being, and in this she was supported by the regnant definitions of Noah Webster. But “Principle” as she used it obviously did not mean an inanimate, impersonal thing. In her system Principle was Love, Life, Spirit, Soul, the conscious, willing, governing “I” of the universe. It was cause, source, origin, as Webster defined it. The opening words of Genesis In the beginning had been in principio in the Vulgate and ἐν ἀρχῇ [en arkhē] in the Septuagint, and in the double meaning of the Latin and Greek terms there is some analogy with Mrs. Eddy’s concept of the divine Principle as the beginning of all things.

When Paul Tillich later defined God as the ground of all being, with the German word Grund rumbling behind the English expression, he used the word in a somewhat similar way—and indeed one of the accepted definitions of Principle is ground or foundation. For that reason Tillich’s defense of his ontological concept of Deity against the criticisms of his fellow theologians throws light on Mrs. Eddy’s  ● ● ●