Article November 15, 1952 Issue

THE NEW BIRTH, HEALING'S PRELUDE

ROBERT DOLLING WELLS

Christian Science offers mankind not only a new interpretation of health, but the infallible means of obtaining and retaining it. The condemnation of men to sin, disease, and death Christian Science rejects. Unlike the customary systems of treatment and prevention of disease, it takes a radically spiritual approach to these problems. Most important, it successfully heals even the evils that mortal opinion has declared incurable.

One who is struggling for healing—whether he is a new student or a mature Christian Scientist—should remember that while healing can and often does result from the work of a Christian Science practitioner, it is to the patient's advantage that he consciously experience a change in or spiritualization of thought, for this change is the new birth. Lest anyone feel, as did Nicodemus, that the new birth is an impossible achievement for the present, we hasten to add and to emphasize that what is required is to awaken to the foundational truth in the eternal structure of reality: man's perfection now as the child, the image and likeness, of God. Jesus told Nicodemus (John 3:3), "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." And in response to his inquirer's incredulous, "How can a man be born when he is old?" he said, "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again."

The change that this birth requires of human thought is a change from the unnatural to the natural, from the devious to the obvious. Man is spontaneously aware of the truth of his relationship to God. He finds it natural to expect all good to flow to him because of this relationship. What is true of the real man will unfold to human consciousness when reasoning is direct, clear, and childlike. To be born again is to change one's thinking from the unreasonable basis of belief in things not of God, hence not real, to the understanding of the things of Spirit, or reality.

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NO UNWANTED MAN
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