A story is told about some boys who found an abandoned baby eagle. One of them decided to take the bird and put it in his barnyard. Soon the baby eagle began scratching in the dirt like the chickens. He never attempted to fly.
He had always been an eagle, but as long as he was kept with the chickens, he was unable to realize his true identity.
So it is with us. The testimony of the physical senses is bombarding us constantly with the suggestion that we are mere mortals, born into matter, made up of matter, and consequently at the mercy of matter. So we scratch in the dirt of earthly beliefs—beliefs of want, woe, distress, and demise—the whole spectrum of the lie of life in matter. But we progressively find freedom from enslaving theories as we realize our true identity: immortal ideas of God, entirely spiritual, never born into matter and therefore never at its mercy. The Bible is full of assurances of our true spiritual existence, like the familiar one in I John: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is."I John 3:2;
