In a very true and important sense salvation may be regarded as progressive self-discovery. The process pertains to human sense and will ultimately eliminate its every false and unideal factor when the true consciousness or Christ-man shall have appeared. The moment the eternal completeness, the unmarred beauty of the divine idea is realized, that moment the ascension is reached and man is fully identified as a son of God.
In Christian Science it is made manifest that the advance of this realization is largely determined by the intelligence and continuity of our individual effort to separate the true self, in thought, from every condition and attachment which is out of keeping with this recognition of man "in the divine image." It is a very common thing for people to associate selfhood with materiality, abnormality, sickness, and sin. This is true even of followers of the world's greatest idealist, Christ Jesus. They have not been made to see that, given the things of which a man thoughtfully speaks as a part of or belonging to himself, as his very own, the world is made aware of what he regards himself to be. We can but define our philosophy of being and our concept of man in our statements of what belongs to us, since in truth being and possession are one,—what we have is what we are.
When therefore we speak of diseases and disharmonies of body and mind with the same sense of possession with which we enumerate the items of our personal property, our practical, every-day thoughts of selfhood are made known to all. When the possession of abnormity has become normal to our thought, when distortion and defect is regarded as no less in keeping with natural endowment than is the perfect and the good, then surely it is time to turn again to the psalmist and read his startling question, "What is man, that thou [God] art mindful of him?" and hear the eternal answer, "Thou .... hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet." True self-recognition is a fundamental condition of happiness, and so long as the world's habits of false identification retain their hold upon us and man is regarded as a material commonplace, linked to things which are quite external and foreign to him, how may we hope to gain the consciousness voiced by St. John when he declared, "Now are we the sons of God"?
Here as everywhere Christian Science is a blessing to the aspiring, in that it establishes the thought of man as wholly of God and therefore wholly Godlike, from which there is speedily acquired an altogether new and true sense of man's individual and abiding possessions. As not before in all the theological centuries Mrs. Eddy has awakened thought to the causal relation between our concept of man and our sense of possession. She teaches that "as God is substance and man is the divine image and likeness, man should wish for, and in reality has, only the substance of good"(Science and Health, p. 301). This ideal concept, the truth about man and what pertains to him, must be brought to the apprehension of mankind before they can engage with any hope or enthusiasm in the effort to bring that truth into demonstration. This ideal concept once grasped, one is able to cognize the sequent but sadly ignored fact that the asserted material laws of sickness and suffering have obtained their concessions, have gained their ingress and advantage through the open door of an utterly false sense of what belongs to man.
One can see that if we assert that a given disease or defect, any abnormity or weakness, is ours, we certainly become partners to its claim, supporters of its rule, and our effort to escape its torment is an endeavor to sunder the shackles which our daily thinking has helped to forge and make secure. The realization that evil has no place or power apart from human belief makes it apparent that in so far as we have consented to abnormality's identification with the belief of personal life, in so far have we contributed to abnormality's continuance, and that we have thus nurtured and preserved in human experience the things that make for our misery, the things we have said we were trying to escape from.
But, says one, how is it possible for one wholly to separate himself from human sense relations and from the use of human expressions? Our Leader answers this query when she says, "No impossible thing do I ask when urging the claims of Christian Science; but because this teaching is in advance of the age, we should not deny our need of its spiritual unfoldment"(Science and Health, p. 371). If we have a clear perception of the ideal and are loyal in thought thereto,—and this is always possible,—we shall begin to be more reserved in our use of unscientific and untrue associations of thought, we shall begin to avoid those classifications and declarations of our belongings which discredit our understanding of man's nature and inheritance. Step by step we shall separate our thought of self from everything that is not truly ours, we shall stop claiming as our own the things that do not belong to God, that are not His perfect ideas, so that the things which are good, beautiful, and true, and they alone, may constitute our perfect and satisfying possession.
