St. Paul speaks of what we understand to be the new birth as "waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body." The Scripture saith, "none but the pure in heart shall see God;" nothing aside from the spiritualization, yea, the highest christianization of thought and desire, can give the true perception of God and divine Science and their results in health, happiness, and holiness. The new birth is not the work of a moment; it begins with moments, and goes on with years—moments of surrender to God, of childlike trust and joyful adoption of good; moments of self-abnegation, self-consecration, heaven-born hope and spiritual love.
Time may commence, but it cannot complete, the new birth,—eternity does this,—for progress is the law of Infinity. Only from the sore travail of mortal mind shall Soul be satisfied, and man awake in His likeness. What a Soul-lighted thought is this, that mortals can lay off the "old man" until they reflect only, and all of the infinite good that we name God, and arrive at the fulness of the stature of man in Christ. In mortal and material man goodness is in embryo; he must, by suffering for sin, be developed into an infant Christian; and feeding at first on the milk of the word, he drinks in the sweet revealings of a new and more spiritual Life and Love. They nourish his hungry hopes, satisfy more his immortal cravings, and so comfort, cheer and bless him, that he saith, In mine infancy, this is enough of heaven to come down to earth. But as he grows into the manhood and womanhood of Christianity, he finds so much wanting, and so very much requisite to become Christ-like, that he saith The Principle of Christianity is infinite, it being God, and this infinite Principle hath infinite claims on man, and these claims are divine, not human; and man's ability to meet them is from God, for being His likeness or image, he must reflect the full dominion of Spirit, even its supremacy over sin, sickness, and death. Here, then, is the awaking from the dream of Life in matter, to the great fact that God is our Life, and we must entertain a higher sense of both God and man. We must learn that Deity is more than a person, or finite form; that God is a divine whole, an all-pervading Intelligence and Love, yea, a divine Principle, and Christianity is a divine science. This newly awakened sense is wholly spiritual; it emanates from Soul instead of body, and is the new birth began in Christian Science.
Now dear reader, pause for a moment with me to contemplate this new-born attitude of thought, for the spot whereon thou treadest is holy ground. Here you stand face to face with the infinite demands of infinite Spirit, and behold for the first time the irresistable conflict between the flesh and Spirit; and before the awful detonations of Sinai you hear and record the thunderings of the spiritual law of Life as opposed to the material law of death, the spiritual law of Love as opposed to the material sense of love, the law of omnipotent harmony and good as opposed to any possible law of sin or sickness; and before the flames have died away on this mount of revelation, like the patriarch of old, you take off your shoes, lay aside your material appendages of understanding, and give up your more material religion, with its rites and ceremonies, and put off your materia medica and hygiene as worse than useless, to sit at the feet of Jesus and meekly bow before the more spiritual idea that our blessed Master gave of the power of God to heal and save. Then it is that you behold for the first time the spiritual and divine Principle that redeems man from sin sickness and death.
