Editorial January 3, 1920 Issue

Newness of Life in Christ

Ella W. Hoag

There is ever something inspiring in the simple word "new." It brings visions of refreshment, of added opportunity, of the possibility of retrieving past mistakes. It immediately lifts thought away from that which is old and worn-out,—from what has been tried and perhaps found wanting,—to a renewal of vigor and fresh occasion for right activity. From the ordinary human viewpoint the word implies a past and a future and seems to present the necessity of perpetual re-creation; but in the light of Christian Science it is coming to be understood that true newness belongs alone to God and is expressed by all that is of Him. Whatever He has made is indestructible, unchangeable, and therefore must contain within itself all that constitutes the qualities of freshness, vigor, and promise.

Theology has speculated much on what it has denominated as the "New Birth;" for when Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," he presented to humanity a problem which it has ever since been endeavoring to solve. To be sure Paul said positively, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new;" and yet again, "Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." Nevertheless, there still seemed to remain the question as to what constituted this new man and how he was to be "put on," or proved to be an integral part of one's own experience.

With the teaching of scholasticism that mortal man was a fallen child of God, who must continually struggle to regain his former estate of perfection, there is scant wonder that discouragement and failure had seemed to attend the larger share of his efforts after righteousness, and as a natural result he had seen only the possibility of winning success in some unknown way in a far-off heaven. Into this darkness the revelation of Christian Science came with its enlightening truth that God's man is still and always has been, as he was in the beginning, the perfect child of God,—that God's man is the only man, and that aught that is wrong and false and evil is but the lie about man, to be recognized as the falsity Jesus defined it and to be thus rebuked, rejected, and proved unreal.

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