Article August 14, 1948 Issue

PRE-EXISTENCE AND UNCHANGING IDENTITY

FLORENCE HAZZARD LLOYD

In one of her wonderfully enlightening Bible lessons in "Miscellaneous Writings," Mary Baker Eddy makes the arresting statement (p.181), "Mortals will lose their sense of mortality—disease, sickness, sin, and death—in the proportion that they gain the sense of man's spiritual preexistence as God's child; as the offspring of good, and not of God's opposite,— evil, or a fallen man."

How shall we gain this realization of man's spiritual Pre-existence? The study of the Bible and of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" and other writings by Mrs. Eddy reveals the facts of true spiritual identity. Christian Science teaches that man's identity, his real being, is the reflection of Spirit, and therefore wholly spiritual, and that his existence as the child of God, who has existed with his Father-Mother God "from the foundation of the world," is eternal. Through this Science of Christianity one learns how to put off the old man and replace him with the new man, the man created in God's own image and likeness.

An antidote to lack of knowledge of our own true identity and that of our neighbor, whom we are commanded by the Master to love as ourselves, is an understanding of Love and its creation. To attain this understanding, spiritualization of thought is necessary, and the daily study of the Lesson-Sermons in the Christian Science Quarterly is a great help in the unfolding of spiritual understanding. The time spent in careful, thoughtful study of these Bible Lessons is of untold value. Jesus admonished (John 5:39), "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

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