Article July 30, 1984 Issue

Our real inheritance

MILDRED MONTGOMERY McLANE

If we think of inheritance as something that is going to come to us in the future, for example, gaining money or goods, we are thinking on a very material level. Christian Scientists are learning that true inheritance is spiritual: eternal, incorporeal life; spiritual love and the satisfaction that results from it; spiritual substance and the good that flows into human experience through our understanding of it.

This inheritance is available right now! God, who gives all good, is reflected by man, His image or idea, every moment, and always has been. The good that God gives is not contingent upon a period of hopeful waiting, deprivation, or turn taking. It is not reserved until after the experience called death, ours or someone else's. Our true birthright as God's heirs extends throughout eternity. Mrs. Eddy exclaims, "What a glorious inheritance is given to us through the understanding of omnipresent Love!"^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 307.}

True inheritance is not something we acquire when a former owner is finished with it, nor is it divisible into parts to be shared. Since all that's true is perennial, we know that our real inheritance, our irrevocable gift from God, the substance of our true being, is spiritual. This birthright cannot be probated by a court of law nor taxed by a material government. It does not begin with what we term birth nor change ownership because of the illusion called death.

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