How often we use the little word "I" glibly, thoughtlessly, and profusely. Yet "I" identifies one with his wish, his will, his thought, and his deed. One is identifying himself either with futile existence, laborious work, sickness, sin, and death or with abundantly happy living, with joyous and rewarding work, with health, purity, and harmonious life.

One who is just getting acquainted with Christian Science soon discovers that its teachings enable him to identify his true selfhood with all that is good, and in so doing to experience good in his everyday life and to dissociate himself from all that is discordant and keep it from entering his experience.

Let us take a typical case of one who has been regenerated and healed of sickness, discord, and frustration in Christian Science. Before he came to know this truth he had been incorrectly identifying himself thus: "I am a poor, suffering, insignificant mortal." Such self-identification is not unusual, for mankind has accepted from generation to generation the theory that mortals are made by God, who has decreed that they work out a nebulous plan in a good and evil world.

There came a time, however, when the one under discussion, tiring of the suffering and futility of material existence, prayed to God in his own way and was led to Christian Science, where he learned to identify man correctly as the temple of the living God, Spirit, and to declare of his real selfhood: "I reflect the eternal substance of Spirit, and am now living in the consciousness of harmony, perfection, happiness, and health. I cannot therefore be identified with a single element of fear, matter, or discord." With this new understanding of his true identity there also came to the student a glimpse of life as wholly spiritual, not physical. He saw that love, vitality, intelligence, joy, peace—indeed, all the qualities of God—were the substance of his identity as God's image and likeness.

Reaching out with a humble sincerity and deep desire to understand more of his true selfhood, this new student became better and better acquainted through his study of Christian Science with spiritual reality and began to identify himself with it. Shortly thereafter his healing and regeneration began. His false identification with mortality, with all its ill-health, despair, fear, inferiority, and failure, gave way to the realization that man exists as the individual expression of divine consciousness. As he consistently denied and repudiated mortal existence and understood real existence to be Godlike and spiritual, buoyancy, happiness, peace, and stability were increasingly manifested in his experience.

Here one may say, '"You mean that through Christian Science one becomes Godlike, even though up to then he has not been?" No. The truth that man's identity is spiritual is the truth which has been eternally. True selfhood has always been conscious of perfection. But mankind, because of their false identification with error, devil, illusion, which are all the same thing, have wrongly accepted a finite personality as God's idea, living in a material world outside the kingdom of God. Man, however, has never been less than God's image, or reflection.

Christian Science reveals the fundamental and incontrovertible facts that there is one self-existent God, Mind, Spirit, filling all space, and that man as the image and likeness of this one Mind is included in the oneness of universal divine consciousness. The mortal concept which claims to be man says, "I'm hurt; I'm sick; I hate; I'm unhappy; I was born into matter; and I die out of it." To these false beliefs claiming to be man, Christian Science says, and proves it, "You do not exist because God, Spirit, Mind, Life, fills all space, within which there is no material personality claiming to be the identity of man." Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 478): "Error says, 'I am man;' but this belief is mortal and far from actual. From beginning to end, whatever is mortal is composed of material human beliefs and of nothing else. That only is real which reflects God."

At first, because he had long identified himself with the erroneous conditions of the physical senses, the beginner in Christian Science may think it somewhat difficult for him to identify himself as God's child. In the Christian Science periodicals and at the Wednesday evening testimony meetings many a one gratefully and sincerely relates how by ceasing to identify himself incorrectly as a sick mortal, a hateful mortal, a dying mortal, an insane mortal, and the like, he has proved in some measure his real and eternal identity to be God's happy, healthy, harmonious, intelligent, and spiritual idea. The Bible declares (I John 3:2), "Now are we the sons of God."

Proper identification of ourselves as God's children enables us to demonstrate the harmonious life which is ordained by God. At this point one might say, "That sounds beautiful and could be true—but it's too late for me: I'm too far gone." Christian Science declares that there is no discordant condition which cannot be destroyed by the understanding of man's spiritual strength and harmony. Disease in its last stage has been healed, misshapen bones have been straightened, and bondage to alcohol has been broken. The "I" that claims to be too far gone is not God's child speaking, but the false mortal concept. Christian Science proves that God's child is ever spiritual and perfect.

Is one falsely identifying himself as a member of a race which he believes is under condemnation? To him, Christian Science says that God, infinite good, knows no material race, creed, or color; no boundaries of hate, prejudice, or persecution. One loving Father-Mother God bestows His impartial love and freedom on all His ideas. Each idea of God is in harmonious relationship with God and His ideas in the divine design. Many in bondage to racial belief have been freed from false identity through Christian Science.

Christian Science is based on the Biblical truth that God and His creation alone are good. Mrs. Eddy says in the textbook (p. 340), "One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture. 'Love thy neighbor as thyself;' annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry,—whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed."

Let us be sure that we are not believing in a material selfhood opposed to Spirit, a selfhood which actually has no identity. Rather, let us identify ourselves with the infinite Mind which is God, and with His spiritual and perfect universe. In "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy says (p. 185), "Self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man, and the acknowledgment and achievement of his spiritual identity as the child of God, is Science that opens the very flood-gates of heaven; whence good flows into every avenue of being, cleansing mortals of all uncleanness, destroying all suffering, and demonstrating the true image and likeness."