What a joy! What relief and release! Liberation! One of the greatest blessings of Christian Science is the way it enables us to drop the burdens of the past!

To mortal view, life is a chain of causes and effects, the effects echoing themselves in further effects. One event causes another; the past causes the present. Sometimes the cycle is positive. But sometimes it isn't; one tragic episode triggers another, and the result is the specter of endlessly self-perpetuating evil.

But Christian Science brings us the spiritual discernment that heals. It revolutionizes our whole view of life and of man. It fulfills the Bible promises by making them practical.

Throughout the tapestry of scriptural teaching, the promises appear and reappear like a shining thread—promises of release from the penalties of a mortal past. With a flash of insight Zophar assures Job that if he will put away evil, he will find his life made new: "Thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away: and thine age shall be clearer than the noonday." ^{Job 11:16, 17.} In Isaiah we find the heavenly assurance, "Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more." ^{Isa. 54:4.} And Ezekiel declares God's message, "I will put a new spirit within you." ^{Ezek. 11:19.}

Such promises give intimations of the redeeming influence of the Christ, Truth. The Apostle Paul spoke repeatedly of this healing influence. For example, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." ^{II Cor. 5:17.} And the great Master, Christ Jesus, went to the very heart of the matter when he told Nicodemus that in order to see the kingdom of God, a man must be born again through inward spiritual purification. ^{See John 3:1–6; see also J. R. Dummelow, ed., The One-Volume Bible Commentary (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1954), p. 779.} It is through this purification or rebirth that we learn how to relinquish the heartaches and earth-weights of the past.

Spiritual rebirth or purification means awakening prompted by the Christ, Truth—a spiritual awakening to the realities of Life as God and of man as His likeness. The understanding of Christian Science shows us how to experience this awakening. In her autobiographical work Retrospection and Introspection, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes: "It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man's real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being. It is 'as a tale that is told,' and 'as the shadow when it declineth.' The heavenly intent of earth's shadows is to chasten the affections, to rebuke human consciousness and turn it gladly from a material, false sense of life and happiness, to spiritual joy and true estimate of being." ^{Ret., p. 21.}

In this "true estimate of being" we find the answer to the mortal nightmare of self-perpetuating evil. We learn that God, Love, omnipotent good, is the only cause that really exists, and that the effect is spiritual man made in God's image and likeness. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress." ^{Science and Health, p. 170.}

In a dream, cause and effect are illusions. They have no relation to fact. Likewise the apparent causes and effects of the mortal cycle are not the reality of your being. The reality is that you are God's reflection or image, at every moment reflecting Him. Think what reflection means. It is the continuous manifestation (emanation) of the primal cause, divine Principle and Mind, expressing itself in its image and effect, spiritual man.

As we understand this, we learn that our real being is and forever has been the unfolding of boundless good, governed by immortal Love. Cruelty and anguish, tragedy and irony, injustice and sin, are forever excluded by divine causation, unfoldment, reflection. The fact in Science is that man's real individuality is derived wholly from God. It continually expresses Him and nothing else. It never was born into matter, never inherited self-destructive traits or cruel weaknesses, never was entangled in a remorseless coil of malevolent causes perpetuating themselves in evil effects. As we gain this understanding of our real individuality and let it govern our thoughts and lives, we find with joy the truth of Paul's words, quoted above, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature."

It is this spiritual purgation reforming the heart, filling it with a deep love for God and godliness, that brings us release from the sins of the past and their effects. The "new birth," this inward purification, erases accumulated burdens by replacing the curse of mortality with the blessings of man's God-illumined being.

The conclusion follows that, as Mrs. Eddy writes, "we own no past, no future, we possess only now." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 12.} Even so: we own no past— and no mortal past owns us. We belong to our heavenly Father, every moment and always, as His loved expression. We derive from Him our entire being, whole and harmonious, in the eternal now of boundless good.

DeWITT JOHN