Editorial March 30, 1907 Issue

THE TRUE SELF–IDENTIFICATION

John B. Willis

Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.—St. John.

In the wondrously beautiful passage which opens the third chapter of the beloved disciple's First Epistle, he refers to true self–identification as a possible, present experience. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." It is the recognition of individuality as a divine idea, and the teaching of Christian Science lays great emphasis upon the vital need of this self–recognition, because of its practical relation to the solution of the least as well as the largest problems of human life.

Though much given to the apotheosis of personality, until it would "bestride the world like a colossus;" and though still lending a willing ear to the mesmeric assurance "Ye shall be as gods," material sense readily accepts the proposition that man is a sequence, an unfinished product of evolution; that he is beholden to heredity, environment, natural law, fate. This conclusion of world–philosophy has molded general mentality until men have acquired the habit of obsequiously linking themselves to all sorts of undesirable conditions and things. They identify the "me" with the weakness rather than the strength, the evil rather than the good, of their antecedents, as well as with present susceptibility to the sickness and death from which they long to flee, and to the sin which at a given moment they may either love or hate.

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