When Alastair's cousins and friends outgrew their bicycles, he had been very happy to have them passed on to him, even if they were secondhand. Now, for Christmas, his parents had given him a bicycle of his own. It was a beautiful new one, painted red (Alastair's favorite color), and it had shining chromium wheels and handlebars.

One afternoon he and his friend Michael came out of the house to go for a ride. But only Michael's bicycle was still there in the garden under the window where it had been left. Alastair's new bike had vanished!

Mother was out shopping, so Alastair ran to tell his sister, Fiona. They were both Christian Scientists, and he knew that Fiona would encourage him to be guided by God, divine Mind, to act rightly. First she telephoned the Police Station, and before Mother returned a policeman with a booming voice came round and wrote down in a black notebook a description of the bicycle and of how it had disappeared.

"I'm afraid, Sonny," he said as he left, "that I can offer you little hope of getting your bike back. This is a very big town as you know, and every day we get reports of stolen bicycles which are never seen again by their owners."

Alastair swallowed hard. "Maybe the policeman is right," he thought.

When Mother returned home, he rushed to tell her what had happened. They sat down and talked together of the truth he had learned in the Christian Science Sunday School: "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." ^{Gen. 1:31;} So God, the true creator, had never made a dishonest man, for man is God's idea and God could not have a dishonest idea. Divine Truth makes a truthful man.

Mother found the place in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy writes, "The wrong thought should be arrested before it has a chance to manifest itself." ^{Science and Health, p. 452;} Together they agreed to arrest the wrong thought that man could be a thief. Then Alastair remembered a passage he had read to his class the Sunday before: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Savior saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." ^{pp. 476, 477.}

Christ Jesus, our Way-shower, healed sin as well as sickness. Alastair saw that to solve this problem they did not have to find a wicked person to be arrested and taken into custody by the police. Instead they must arrest—check—any wrong belief about man appearing in their own thinking.

When Mother went to tuck him up in bed last thing that night she found him asleep with his own copy of Science and Health (it was red, too) lying open where he had been reading. Next morning he was his usual happy self and decided to say nothing more about the missing bicycle. He tried to keep a "correct view of man" in his thoughts.

Three days later the police telephoned to say a lady had wheeled a boy's red bicycle to the Police Station. "That sounds exactly like mine!" Alastair cried hopefully. The police said the lady saw it in her garden just inside the closed gate when she drew back her curtains that morning. During the night it must have been placed there where it could not be missed.

Alastair went to the station and recognized his bike immediately. The wrong thought had been arrested. And Alastair had proved that God's man is not a thief but that he reflects the goodness of God.