Hourly, Christian Science is blotting out false impressions and establishing true ones in the consciousness of its active students. The appearing of the true man in God's image hastens the disappearing of the material misconception of man, and this appearing is accompanied by healing and regeneration. However disfigured the slate of human experience, Christian Science enables one to prove that misleading impressions are effaced through spiritual understanding and by dwelling persistently on the unmarred record of spiritual man.
Jesus emphasized the way of salvation through spiritual awakening. When he said to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," he showed the necessity for wiping out the belief in a false start. In "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 22) Mrs. Eddy writes: "God is over all. He alone is our origin, aim, and being." In effect Jesus said that Nicodemus must understand that Spirit is the pure and only origin of man, and that spiritual awakening is the one means of salvation. To "see the kingdom" means to acknowledge and rejoice in the infinite perfection of God and His creation, and to behold one's own place in that creation. And should one be attributing to himself any personal ability or virtue underived from Deity, as possibly Nicodemus, a distinguished ruler, may have done, he must also apply the lesson of the "new birth" to evanescent human complacency. All must give God the glory for whatever good is expressed by anyone. When the seeming handicaps of new or old errors are especially pressing, one should renewedly apply to himself the lesson of the "new birth," and thereby "see the kingdom," the supreme and everlasting government of good.
Christian Science shows the impossibility of building up anything real and permanent on the basis of human personality, or through any imperfect medium. It does not call upon us to turn a sinner into a saint, for Jesus said that new wine could not be put into old bottles, and that any attempt to patch old cloth with new would result in the tearing away of the old cloth. In other words, evil never becomes good; it is a myth to be denied place, power, authority, law, precedent, present, or future.
