Article February 4, 1967 Issue

Can a Serpent Be Changed into a Staff?

PETER B. VANDERHOEF

Christian Science teaches us that our real identity is the image and likeness of God, good. Through the study and practice of this Science we are aroused to identify ourselves as we really are, God's ideas, subject only to God and His beneficent law. When this spiritual fact is understood, the erroneous, mortal sense that would beguile us into believing that we are mortals who can degenerate through sin, be limited by inadequacies, or handicapped by sickness is destroyed.

Referring to the serpent's beguiling of Adam and Eve, Mrs. Eddy says, "A sense of evil is supposed to have spoken, been listened to, and afterwards to have formed an evil sense that blinded the eyes of reason, masked with deformity the glories of revelation, and shamed the face of mortals."^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 332;} And she continues: "What was this sense? Error versus Truth: first, a supposition; second, a false belief; third, suffering; fourth, death."

Through her spiritual understanding of true being, Mrs. Eddy exposed the lie that the serpent's supposed talk could form an evil sense of man that could inflict men with the ills of the flesh. Mortal mind's illusions, the serpent's supposed talk, called in Christian Science animal magnetism, claim to be the impulses of our consciousness. It is the activity in human thought of resentment, fear, self-indulgence, sensuality, and the like. But the action of the carnal mind is stopped and abandoned when the spiritual qualities of true consciousness well up in us and become Christly action governing our thinking and life.

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