Our Unlimited Starting Point

ELIZABETH GLASS BARLOW

Does it shock you to learn that how we identify ourselves determines to a large extent our present condition? Our happiness or misery, our abundance or lack of it, are intimately involved with the starting point of our thought. With matter as the basis of thought we are doomed to frustrations and dead-end streets, or to tunnels without much light at their faraway endings.

Christian Science lifts our standard and enables us with flawless logic to start from the divine Mind, God, in our evaluation and rating of ourselves and others. This Science offers a new understanding of the first chapter of Genesis with its statement that God made man in His likeness.

In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy tells us, "Man is by no means a material germ rising from the imperfect and endeavoring to reach Spirit above his origin."^{Science and Health, p. 246;} Yet isn't this view of man exactly what popular theology teaches and what we have been educated to accept? A God-made man fallen to the level of a sinning mortal through the deceptions of a talking serpent? A mortal who must then be lifted up to Spirit? Perhaps he will get there in some distant millennium, but it's almost a sin to think it could happen now.