My high-school freshman English class was reading Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. During a quiz on part of the book, I discovered cheating among a few of the students. As a teacher, I knew that the usual procedure would be that those who had cheated would fail the quiz and receive the admonitions they had no doubt heard before. But I couldn't leave the experience there; something more had to happen—which, in my own frame of reference, meant healing, although I had no idea what form that would take.

I began asking the students a few questions, such as, "Do you do this in your other classes, too?" and "Do you realize that cheating is stealing?" They indicated that cheating was not common in every class because some teachers were just too "scary," and the students feared more than the usual consequences. But no, it wouldn't work for me to become one of the usual consequences. But no, it wouldn't work for me to become one of the "scary" teachers; severity of consequences might not always deter those who wanted to cheat from doing so. And no, they had never thought that cheating is stealing.... At the end of that hour I told my class that our work on this issue was not finished. I'm sure they wondered what else I could possibly do—so did I!

I wanted to teach the students a lesson they would never forget. As noble as that purpose was, however, I knew it would not be accomplished unless I proceeded from a spiritual basis. That evening I asked God what I needed to know. I opened the Bible to Ecclesiastes: "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" (7:29). Was it my responsibility to purge my students of the desire to cheat as one of the "many inventions" extraneous to the natural uprightness of their character? No. My responsibility was to purify my own thinking about them—to see them as the Bible says they are created, in the image and likeness of God.

Not only does the Bible give as authority for seeing everyone as the creation of God—totally good—but the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, supports the Biblical case for the spiritual purity of each of God's children. This book describes children as "the spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love" (p. 582).

Looking through the class list, I considered the spiritual nature of the individual students and the qualities each expressed or things he or she had done to express this higher definition. I consciously realized that these were the reality of their identities and that the desire to cheat had no basis in this reality. It simply was not included in their personhood. I didn't know that I would say the next day in class, but I did have a clear concept of who these children were, and I trusted that God would lead us all to the right conclusion.

What happened the next day was this: I began talking about Pip, the young hero of Great Expectations, and the qualities of his character at the beginning of the book. We discussed how he changed after circumstances placed him among people who influenced him to live in a way that was completely foreign to his true nature. Ignorant of the forces at work against him, he thought, said, and did things he never would have done in his right mind. I suggested that maybe he was so ill at ease in this lifestyle that at the time he became ill—dis-eased—he was ready to see what had happened to him and to reclaim his true nature.

I asked the students how they felt when they did something they knew was wrong. A few said that sometimes they didn't have a clear feeling of "this is wrong," but rather a nagging, nameless feeling of being unsettled or uncomfortable. I suggested that this discomfort is actually a correct intuition telling us when our actions are not consistent with our real nature.

We reasoned together that if we believe that a certain action is right when it is actually wrong, then we are believing a lie, and we can wake up from the lie and see the truth at any time. When we do, that awakening is permanent; we can never go back to the previous behavior, because now we know better.

After exploring several examples of this ability to see the truth about something, I told them in no uncertain terms that cheating is not in the true nature of any one of us, because we are created to be wholly good. The right rules will always feel right because they are consistent with who we really are.

Then I brought up a question from the previous day: Is fear of "consequences" a valid reason to avoid doing something wrong? We had to conclude that this kind of fear might help to prevent wrongdoing, but that fear is only a surface reason; the real reason has to do with being true to our own sense of ourselves—our real nature.

We had no more incidents of cheating.

At the end of the school year, one boy came to me and said, "I was never the best student in your class, but I learned something that I will never forget. I learned to question myself before I do something to see if I'm being consistent with my true nature. I have even helped some of my friends do the same thing. Our talk that day was not just about cheating in a class; it was about my life. I might forget a lot of the English you tried to teach me, but I'll never forget what you said about my true nature!"