Who Am I?

John B. Willis

The queries, Who am I? What my nature? Whence? Where to? assault every human intelligence, and the consequent mental wonderment and turmoil puts a man in a class by himself. He is the only creature who is troubled about the things he does not yet know. Here he has no kin; he is quite unique and peculiar.

The attempted answers which men have given to these questions constitute the supreme contradiction of religious literature, and yet the statement that man is a contradiction by nature is an offense to one's highest intuition. However many make the colossal mistake of identifying selfhood with mortal consciousness, and however familiar we all may be with the rule of ignoble impulse, nevertheless the "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" concept of man's make-up is instinctively objected to by all nobility within. The sense of individuality and of indivisibility clasp hands in right consciousness, and the aversion to being broken up into unlike and opposing parts is both assertive and universal.

With respect to the nature of man it is both an interesting and an incongruous fact that, without intending it, theology has always stood for superficial sense rather than for spiritual intuition, and today man is being thus materialistically conceived and brought forth by the great body of religious believers. Thus the teaching of Christian Science, that God "the infinite Principle is reflected by . . . spiritual individuality" alone, and that "the material so-called senses have no cognizance of either Principle or its idea," as stated by Mrs. Eddy on page 258 of Science and Health, has broken in upon complacent religious sense as a startling if not threateningly destructive innovation. While we have been taught that men were to become a unity of goodness and truth in a future life, prevailing sense has denied the present possibility of the attainment of this ideal, and we have the ignorant self-depreciation of the average man, a stupid, uncourageous counterfeit of the humility of Moses when he said, "Who am I, that I should . . . bring forth the children of Israel."

In answering the question Who am I? Christian Science declares that man is indeed the image of God; that the material sense of man is a delusion and a snare, and that only through the maintenance of this discrimination can the integrity of man be preserved in human thought and self-depreciation be consistently rebuked. To disparage or decry the man of God's making is just as blasphemous as to exalt the man of material sense, and yet this cannot be escaped from by those who fail to perceive "the difference between the offspring of Soul and of material sense, of Truth and of error" (Science and Health, p. 30).

The greatest thing about a man is that he is able to think about God, and Christian Science is eventful to its every student in that it awakens a sense of self that would lay hold upon and scientifically attach itself to the infinite intelligence, divine Love. In declaring for the sonship of man, Christian Science opens the door for his compass of the universe. Likeness to God removes every limit to one's companionship with greatness, and conscious at-one-ment with God becomes his inevitable goal. To be able to think a thing is to be able to understand and so to assimilate it, hence in the best sense it is to gain for our very own the substance of all good.

"All things are yours," said the great apostle, and having gained this realization the saints and sages have always been rich, because in their ever recurring flights to the plane of higher spiritual perception, they have entered into the inheritance of real wealth, the possible possession of every divine idea. Thus they have disclosed to others the secret of greatness, the nature of man. In their habit of claiming for their own everything that is good, beautiful, and true, they have illustrated the fact that ignorance always speaks for the poverty rule of an unworthy material sense of self; wisdom for the freedom and enrichment of a spiritual sense of self.

One hears much said about putting self out of the way, but the phrase has acquired quite a new meaning to one who through Christian Science has learned that not self but false sense is to be contemned, and that to "put off the old man" is not to give up self, but to gain it.

John B. Willis.

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Humility versus Pride

July 17, 1915

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