In the passages of Scripture from the third chapter of the first epistle of John selected by our Leader to be read at the Sunday services as correlative to the "scientific statement of being" from the Christian Science text-book (p. 468), the personal pronoun in the first person plural occurs eight times. It is evident, therefore, that the antecedent of this pronoun must be a quite important factor in these passages. For what then does the word stand? Is this "we" or "us" personal, meaning only the writer and certain others to whom the lines are addressed? Or is it sectarian, and intended to include only the adherents of a certain religious belief? Or is it universal, representing humanity?

These passages in their correlation to the "scientific statement of being" should therefore furnish us the key to their interpretation. The conclusion of the "scientific statement of being" reads, "Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual" (Science and Health, p. 468). The whole purpose of this statement is the declaration of man's spiritual nature; of his sonship with God. The theme of the correlative Scripture is, in this case, identical; and the antecedent of its personal pronoun we may fairly assume to be none other than the "man" of the scientific statement of being. These selections are neither of them in any way sectarian. Both are in the broadest sense universal.

The constant recurrence of this pronoun in the Scripture reading has a tendency to lead one to place upon it an emphasis which may cause the listener unfamiliar with Christian Science to suppose that it is intended to use the word in a sectarian sense. The justification of this inference lies in the law that emphasis tends to narrow the meaning of the word emphasized and cause it to pass from its general to its more specific signification; indeed it is questionable if the pronoun at any time requires special emphasis to bring out the full meaning of these passages. If in the first clause thought is especially directed to "us" as the recipients of God's love, the tendency is for the emphasis on this word to repeat itself throughout the reading, so that the appreciation of the sequence of thought is somewhat disturbed by the recurring intrustion of the idea of personality.

In a not unusual rendering of these passages thought is directed rather to God's gift of love, and to the things that pertain to it. The climactic idea of the first clause is then that of the bestowal of this gift. The second clause defines the very nature of the gift, the "manner" of love; that "we [man] should be called the sons of God." The third salient idea is that of the world's ignorance of this gift. The world "knoweth not." That the world knoweth not "us," if the line means no more, is indeed too small a matter to merit the position the statement occupies. But that the world knoweth not man as the son of God is the essence of the one great problem of being. The evidence that the world knoweth not "man" appears in its rejection of the manifestation of the true man and of the proof of his relationship to God revealed in the life of Christ Jesus.

The fourth affirmation regarding this gift is its immediateness. It is "now" that we (man) are the sons of God. The gift has the form, not of promise, but of present actuality. Known or not known, it is. In spite of the world's ignorance and indifference, it remains the one great fact. The fifth assertion is of supreme confidence that, although human consciousness as yet but dimly discerns the fact and the meaning of man's sonship with God, the constant contemplation and emulation of the Christ-ideal will cause the Christ-life and the Christ-mind to be understood and realized and manifested in human experience, until both God and man are fully known and their relationship established in human consciousness.

For "we know"! The world knoweth not, but "we" know! Is not this "we" somewhat personal or sectarian? Does not the assertion imply a schism in the brotherhood of man, a division between believers and non-believers? Here as elsewhere the pronoun refers to man. The sense of its use is therefore universal. The division implied is that which eternally exists between man in God's likeness and "the sinning race of Adam" (Ibid., p. 345); between man receiving the Christ-ideal and with it "power to become the sons of God," and men of whom Jesus said, "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do." This separation between the chosen of God and the rejected finds its line of cleavage, not between races as was anciently believed, not between sects as later theories affirm, not even between individuals as many still hold; but within the individual.

The demands of Truth are upon every man. They are imperative and eternal. "Neither death, nor life, ... nor things present, nor things to come" can make man to be other than the likeness of God; and the realization of this fact is the universal heritage of man. Universal, likewise, so far as mundane experience goes, is the temptation to reject this truth and regard man as material, as suffering and mortal, as an animal preying upon others and becoming in turn a prey; as being the creature the senses declare him to be. Until "the time of harvest" these two contradictory concepts of man are found presenting their claims in each individual human consciousness. Though to human sense their proximity appears such that they may seem to occupy the same space at the same time, yet the division between them is really sharp and clear cut; not merely a line that may be crossed at will, but a gulf as wide and impassable as that between Lazarus and Dives.

One or the other of these concepts constitutes the reality of man's being. Both do not. Neither is one the ultimate reality for one individual and the other for another. If sense testimony is correct when it says that man is born of the flesh, it is also correct when it says that man dies. If the witness of the spirit is true when it affirms that man is the son of God, then man does not die in any instance. Spiritual man is not in need of salvation for he knows no other condition. Fleshly man cannot be saved, for he is of the world that passeth away. The need of human consciousness is to know, as Mrs. Eddy declares, that "man is not material; he is spiritual;" and to experience the regeneration which this understanding brings. Sonship with God is the expression of God's love from which not even the collapse of the objective universe shall be able to separate man. It thus appears that the division between the man of the apostle's fellowship who knows and appreciates God's gift and the man of the world who knows it not is not sectarian but has the same ultimate meaning for each individual in the universe.

The final sentence of the correlative Scripture sets forth the conditions essential to growth in the realization of man's sonship with God: "And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure." The preceding declarations of both readings have been as broad and universal as the sunlight; this concluding statement is as narrow and incisive as a single ray. It carries home the immediate significance of these ultimate truths. It implies that the realization of man's sonship with God, of man as God's likeness, begins and ends with Godlikeness and leaves room for nothing else. The demand is purity, and it is urged on the ground that although the fact of man's sonship with God is universal, the hope of its realization cannot exist apart from the effort to be pure; to be like God as revealed in Christ. Error is always error, but to that consciousness which gives it room it stands for the time as truth, so that, however universal and gracious God's love, in error there can be no hope, except as the inception of hope impels to departure from error through the effort to be pure.

Thus it is seen that though the ultimate meaning of truth is the same for each individual, its immediate meaning is not, but varies for each human consciousness according as that consciousness recognizes man as the son of God or sees in him the offspring of the flesh. The glory of man's sonship with God is manifest only to him who accepts it and according to the measure of his acceptance. If one's aims and affections are fixed on things that are material, he must feel them slip from his grasp; if on things that are spiritual, he will know their permanence and the permanence of his faculties for their appreciation.

This discussion of the immediate significance of ultimate truth leads us back to the evident fact that the apostle addressed his epistle to a more or less definite body of individuals who had taken the first steps in the realization of God's gift, and who were obeying the injunction to come out from the world and be separate; also to the probability that in writing these lines this body of compatriots was in his thought the immediate antecedent of the much used pronoun, and that the original significance of these words was thus in a large degree personal. We may go farther, and say that the latter-day successors of that early church also have a right to claim a share in the personal significance of these passages; have a right to feel that they are addressed distinctively to those who are following the leadings of Truth in demonstration of sonship with God.

Is it not then mere verbal jugglery to attribute to these words this duality of meaning, and especially to give preeminence to that meaning which appears to have been less obviously in the writer's thought? No! Dual meanings are found throughout the Scriptures because truth upon the lower plane is but the shadow and type of truth upon the higher plane. There exists a truthful literal interpretation and a truthful spiritual interpretation, which have the appearance of duality but which are unified by comparison in a perspective that shows their aspect on both levels. The differences are then found to be, not in the thought itself, but in the planes upon which its image is cast. The "scientific statement of being" is an utterance upon the plane of absolute Science, and the correlative Scripture should be considered upon the same plane.

The separation of the Christian from the world is a type of the separation between the man of God and the man of this world which is taking place in his own consciousness; and this in turn is a type of, as well as a part of, the separation between reality and illusion which is going on in human consciousness universally. This separation is in no case sectarian. It is evangelical. Its bars are raised not against humanity, but against sin.