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"?
