THE human belief of a law called heredity is to day perhaps one of the most prolific sources of evil. This belief seems to be so established in human consciousness that one hardly knows how firmly it is believed in until there appears some afflictive experience, physical or moral, which has arisen because of it. It is mankind that accepts a material creation as the real and actual manifestation of an infinite supreme cause, God; that also accepts an inheritance from the Adam of this supposed creation. A son believes that he has inherited some mental quality or condition of body from his material forefathers, and that release from these afflictive conditions is hopeless because they are the result of an inescapable law called heredity.
There are to day a multitude of people who firmly believe that they cannot be healed of some particular disease because some father, or grandfather, or still more remote progenitor, has had the same disease. They are possessed with the belief that it is "in the family," maybe "in the blood;" that they have "inherited" it and are therefore subject to it as these others before them have been. Christian Science brings to such as these their first message of cheer and hope, telling them of a sure way of escape from their bondage. It tells them that what has to be accomplished is not really the healing of a diseased condition of matter, but the destruction of the false belief in the reality and power of a mortal superstition called a law of heredity. They next learn that in order for one to lose his faith in this false law, he must change his concept of father, mother, and child, and gain a new sense of generation, a new sense of birth, in order to hear and obey the command of Christ Jesus, "Ye must be born again."
Christ Jesus said at another time to the multitude which so often thronged him, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." Let suffering humanity hear this emancipation proclamation of the Christ; and let it heed its declaration of the sure and scientific way to freedom! These enunciations of the Master are statements of eternal Truth, always true, always available, always demonstrable, for all people in all times, in all places. Just so long as the concept of the creator, the Father, is believed to include the possibility of an expression in matter, just so long will the child of that concept seem to express an inheritance from matter, with its limitations and liabilities, its sin, disease, and death. The concept of a material child as the offspring of the one creator, God, necessitates the belief that this infinite, self existing first cause must include within itself the element of matter. No one will assert that what is called matter includes within and of itself the qualities which are essential to and inherent in self existence. Any one assuming such would be forced to the conclusion that the first and therefore necessarily self existent cause must inherently include its opposite. To admit any possibility of such elemental oppositeness is to deny to this cause either priority or continuity; for it would provide for its own deterioration and ultimate destruction, and thus preclude the possibility of self existence, which is the first essential of a first cause.
