Article October 24, 1942 Issue

Our Inheritance

HELEN W. READ

Is there a law of heredity? Emphatically our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, says in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 178), "Heredity is not a law." She adds, "In proportion to our understanding of Christian Science, we are freed from the belief of heredity, of mind in matter or animal magnetism."

Instead of being a law, then, heredity is merely a belief, a conjectural and speculative theory that is based on the false testimony of the material senses. It is a mythical law that never really existed or operated anywhere, upon anybody. This suppositional law is mortal mind's counterfeit or imitation of the real, spiritual law of inheritance or reflection, the divine law which is based upon the truth that God is our Father-Mother and man is His spiritual offspring. This law proceeds from unfailing divine Principle and is certain and inevitable; furthermore, it rebukes and destroys the seeming activity of its counterfeit. Paul declared, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."

Heredity is a false conclusion drawn from the mistaken premise that man is material. The whole theory thereby collapses, for God is the only cause and creator and is man's only cause and creator and is man's only parent. Heredity is a grave mistake, for it supposes that man lives in matter, that life, intelligence, and substance are material, whereas man is a spiritual, incorporeal being, the likeness of Spirit, living in Soul, the only intelligence and substance. The real man is inseparable from God, and to this spiritual man there is no law of heredity. In the first chapter of Genesis may be found the record of spiritual creation, in which God is the creator and man His image and likeness. The second chapter of Genesis gives an account of a dream creation, wherein the Lord God is represented as a creator and man as formed of the dust of the earth. Of this dream state Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, pp. 306, 307), "The parent of all human discord was the Adam-dream, the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter."

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