Article May 10, 1930 Issue

Self-knowledge

HARRY EDWARD DE LASAUX, JR.

That self-knowledge is necessary for one's well-being few will deny, but just how to go about measuring the right and wrong of one's thinking and doing has in the past been no easy task for mankind. Human standards are at best so fallible and capricious that one may judge himself by standards which are merely the conventions of his time, and thereby may not only fail to acquire true self-knowledge, but may even misjudge himself and others, and suffer therefrom.

The Bible, spiritually understood, is an unchanging standard. The first chapter of Genesis furnishes mankind with the perfect basis of self-knowledge: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." Man is image; that is, he is the likeness of God. Therefore, if we would attain to true self-knowledge, we must first know God. Since God is the governing intelligence of the universe, He must of necessity be divine Mind, Spirit. And since man is the image of God, he is the image of Spirit, divine Mind; therefore man is spiritual.

To think of the real man as wholly spiritual, unfettered by a material, sinful selfhood, is to bring to mankind a new concept of man. But to Christ Jesus spiritual man was the only man; and this truth was the basis of his great healing works. Christian Science declares that in proportion as mortals apprehend this true selfhood, even as Jesus exhorted them to do, their false sense of self with its wrong desires, mistaken motives, and thwarted purposes, begins to disappear.

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