I wish to express gratitude to our dear Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, for her explanation in Science and Health of the two accounts of creation in Genesis, the false and the true.
Although I had been studying Christian Science for about fifteen years and had had many healings, there was a fear at the back of my thought of the change of life. A line in Hymn No. 148, "No change my heart shall fear," was a comfort, but it did not heal that fear. A recent Lesson-Sermon in the Christian Science Quarterly on "Adam and Fallen Man" reminded me of my healing, and of how wonderfully I came through the change which I had feared since I had witnessed my mother's difficulty, when I was a little girl.
I went to a loving practitioner and told her of my fears, which included that of heredity, for I was supposed to resemble my mother. When I said that people were constantly remarking, "You are just like your mother," the practitioner advised me to declare silently, "Yes, I am—like my Father-Mother God." She told me to think of myself as the man in the first chapter of Genesis, made in God's own image and likeness. I was not a child of Eve, who was made, according to the second chapter of Genesis, after a mist had arisen. As Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 526), "This second biblical account is a picture of error throughout." If the first record was true, the second must be untrue. If untrue, God did not curse man, and if there is no curse there is no penalty. Therefore, as a child of God, I could not suffer.
