To understand our sonship with God and what we have to do to claim it is of great importance. To be heirs to an estate does us no good if we do not claim our heritage; nor does it do us any good to have a father's guidance and a mother's love if we repudiate and spurn them. So we must claim our sonship, but first of all we must learn what this sonship is.
In Christian Science, words take on new meanings. And so in a remarkable Bible Lesson, which begins on page 180 of her "Miscellaneous Writings," Mary Baker Eddy, the beloved Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, points to the need of spiritualizing our sense of sonship. We must understand sonship not in terms of a personal relationship of man to God but as the scientific order of his being. Thus we shall replace the human concept of a father, a mother, and a host of sons, each a separate and detached entity, with the scientific understanding of the relationship of God and man, divine Principle and idea. In this relationship the idea can never be severed from its source, nor can it be less than God's perfect and eternal expression. Embraced in Love, each idea moves in accord with its Principle.
Mrs. Eddy links the spiritual sense of sonship with "the scientific statement of being," found on page 468 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," by giving us I John 3:1–3 as its correlative Scripture. Verse 1 begins, "Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God."
