When Christ Jesus made the startling declaration, "Before Abraham was, I am," he not only referred to the eternality of universal Truth, but also to his own pre-existence as the individual son of God, an individual instance of divine reflection. It will be readily seen that these words apply to all the individual sons of God, just as they did to Jesus, the Christ.
Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 267): "It is generally conceded that God is Father, eternal, self-created, infinite. If this is so, the forever Father must have had children prior to Adam. The great I am made all 'that was made.' Hence man and the spiritual universe coexist with God." But the fact of man's eternal existence, the eternal continuity of his being as the conscious reflection of divine Mind, or Spirit, does not imply pre-existence of a material nature. Neither does it imply previous or subsequent incarnations or reincarnations of finite souls or spirits. Such a belief is not scientifically Christian.
How or why one has seemed to get into this so-called human existence, this dream of mortality with its accompanying vicissitudes, is not so important a question as how one can get out of it. Therefore, from the present moment of our conscious experience, from where Christian Science finds us today, what we need is to let our outlook on existence be directed toward the time when, through the understanding and demonstration of Christ in Christian Science, we shall have achieved complete freedom from the belief that life is mortal. Therefore we should avoid becoming involved in vain questioning as to why we seem to find ourselves in a condition or experience from which we need to be saved, and should hold our thought more and more to the great fact stated by our Leader on page 428 of Science and Health, "Man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal."
