Christian Science is daily establishing freedom for those who had believed themselves helpless victims of hereditary taints. Tracing their supine resignation and its dire results to materialistic theories, this Science presents the subject of inheritance redemptively. In the following statement, Mary Baker Eddy strikes at the root of human trouble (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 262): "The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man's origin."
Misled by the generally accepted sense of origin, many gauge their prospects according to the standard of their forebears. A person's pedigree is to some extent supposed to forecast his stature and his features, his intelligence and his character, his health and the length of his days. When applying for life insurance he may be asked more questions about his parents than about himself. Pronounced moral and physical defects in the ancestral line are regarded as detrimental to his prospects. In other cases, more favorable from the standpoint of parents and progeny, an individual may hazily and lazily rely for success in life on his lineal "background" rather than on his own demonstrated "foreground."
Christian Science turns human thought away from this intolerable theory of heredity to the following scientific statement found in Genesis: "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." This primal and final pronouncement of God, the one creator, reveals to each one his individual inheritance, straight from the pure fount of Spirit.
