Although Nicodemus said to Jesus, "No man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him" (John 3:2), he did not know how to attain spirituality of thought, which possesses the assurance of God's presence. Jesus' words showed the way to attain it for all time and for all men. He said, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Early in my life, I had an experience which proved in a measure to be my rebirth.
As I approached college age, I decided to work my way through school so as to relieve my mother of the responsibility of educating me, the eldest of her three daughters, whom she had supported alone and through many vicissitudes by constantly depending on Christian Science in every way. After a year and a half in a boarding school where I overworked in an endeavor to earn my way and keep up scholastically, I became too ill to continue. When I came home I recovered enough to take a position which I planned to keep until the beginning of another school year.
Up to this time, although I had never known any other religion, had regularly attended the Christian Science Sunday School, and loved Science, I had really never had a test of my own understanding or, one might say, had never become a Christian Scientist in my own name. I had not been "born again." As far back as I can remember, if I opened my eyes before daylight, I saw my mother studying Christian Science by artificial light long before any of us had left our beds. So, through almost a superstitious sense, I had come to feel that her consecrated early morning prayers built an impenetrable wall around each one of us and therefore nothing could happen to us; and even if it did, it would not amount to anything.
