AMONG the laws supposed to govern men, perhaps none has brought more hopeless misery into the world than the belief in heredity. There seemed to be a finality about its decisions from which there was no appeal, and the mystery of its fearful sentences, believed to be supported by the Bible and to originate in an all-wise, all-powerful God, has brought many to the brink of atheism. In dealing with this question our dear Leader says, "The transmission of disease or of certain idiosyncrasies of mortal mind would be impossible if this great fact of being were learned,—namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter being, for Life is God" (Science and Health, p. 228).
In reviewing this condition of human affairs, one wonders how men have ever found the courage to live without the inspiration of divine Science; to take up their heavy burdens and march on, without hope of escape, to sin, suffering, and death here, and a hereafter unknown and feared. Surely there must have come at times to human thought some glimpsed sense of the truth, some glorified indication of God's being as Love, that animated humanity with new courage and fresh determination, else they could never have weathered the storms of anguish and doubt. And that which has been accomplished through these occasional fleeting revelations of Truth has at times indeed seemed to be marvelous. Men have sometimes seen clearly enough to escape entirely an inherited doom for themselves, and yet until Christian Science came to the world nothing had been discovered that was universal, always reliable, and that would entirely annul for all time and for all men the asserted law of heredity, expressed in sin, disease, and death.
It is with deep gratitude that students of Christian Science realize that they do not have to stop where the writer did years ago, with an imperfect concept of man's possibilities, a hopeless trust in human means, and with the great problem of evil still unsolved; for through its teachings the way to individual present salvation from all evil, including the law of heredity, is made clear to all who wish to follow it. It is not a visionary path, for many have those behind of the wonderful freedom they have already experienced, and the opening vistas of unlimited blessings before them.
