Crowds of shoppers and commuters were hurrying through the railroad terminal to their suburban trains at the close of the business day. Suddenly a fear-filled cry, "Mama! Mama! Mama!" was heard above the noise of train bells, puffing engines, and the muffled scuffle of moving feet. A little child had found herself in a strange world of persons and things, as she wandered for a moment from her mother's side. At her cry, we turned to see that she already had found her mother close by. What made her fear? Separation—a belief she was lost and apart from her mother. When she knew she was not separated from her mother's protecting love, there was no fear. A sense of reunitedness to her mother dissolved it. In joyful security, her hand in her parent's, she went happily on her way.

We are all children—children of the one great Father-Mother God, the Life and the Mind which is the sole source and substance of us all. Our fears and our problems—all of them—result from our believing that we are separated from God. How sorely we need to discover that our great all-loving Parent—never a human personality—is self-existent intelligence, Mind, Love, uniting us in conscious oneness with Him, even as idea is one with Mind, its only substance and Life. Separation from God is never thought, feared, or felt by the child of God, for no forces exist that can sever the expression of Mind from Mind.

Christ Jesus emphasized with unequivocal statements man's inseparability from his Parent, the father Mind. Said he, "I and my Father are one," a statement which Mrs. Eddy quotes on page 361 of Science and Health, and explains thus, "that is, one in quality, not in quantity."

Mortals, generally, conceive themselves to be a few, or more, pounds of inexpensive chemicals arranged in a three-dimensional body with an unexplained mental mechanism inside, and living on a sphere of matter subject to forces which make, impair, and destroy them. The sense of man as spiritual, inseparably united by the thought forces of intelligence to the universal Mind, Spirit, God, yet remains to be discovered by them in the teachings of Christ Jesus and Christian Science.

Christian Science challenges the material belief that man is a bundle of common material elements. A book recently appeared entitled "You Are What You Eat." Cucumbers and carrots, beans and bannanas! Yet this is logical if matter is the substance of man. But this is the material misconception of man. It is not man, God's son. We displace this false concept, and rid our consciousness of it, step by step, as we spiritually understand that our selfhood is spiritual, of the quality of Mind, God, as inseparable from God as is a sunbeam from the sun. Ponder how inseparable they are.

"The belief that man has existence or mind separate from God is a dying error," writes Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health, p. 42). Of the Master, Mrs. Eddy says, "He claimed no intelligence, action, nor life separate from God" (ibid., p. 136). Are we knowing that our only true intelligence, consciousness, action, and life are inseparable from, because coexistent and coactive with, God?

How do we rid ourselves of the belief that our selfhood is separate from God? By humble obedience to the Mind that is God. "Let us rid ourselves of the belief that man is separated from God," writes Mrs. Eddy, "and obey only the divine Principle, Life and Love. Here is the great point of departure for all true spiritual growth" (ibid., p. 91). Obedience to God brings awareness of our unity with Him. Disobedience to God separates us, in belief, from Him.

Spiritual growth is what the Christian Scientist desires more than all else, and the gaining of it is something like a journey. There is a point of departure and a destination. The point of departure is where we rid ourselves of the belief that our life is separate from God, and discover it is completely one with God. The degree of our obedience to our Father is the measure of what we realize of our inseparability from Him. A helpful definition of obedience is "to subject oneself to a principle." As the idea, or effect, of Mind, man is naturally subject to the Principle that is Mind, and to nothing else. God's control is the one determining influence in his life.

The little child believed she was separated from her mother, and with this belief came bewilderment, confusion, and fear. When she knew she was not so separated, her joy and peace reappeared. Mortals believe they are separated from God, and with this belief, fear and discouragement, sickness and sin possess them. As they learn the truth Jesus came to tell them, now made clear in Christian Science, of man's inseparability from God, their fear lessens, their trust and reliance on God grows, and they go forward from "the great point of departure" on life's journey toward the one true objective, the full understanding and realization that man is never for an instant separated from God, because as God's idea and expression he is naturally and eternally at one with omnipresent good.

Paul Stark Seeley