It's like coming home—returning once again to the consciousness of our blessed union with God. Meekly we retrace our steps out of the insanity of sin and back to the stability of a God-centered life.

Through cleansing tears of repentance, we turn to our Father-Mother; and His healing embrace gently, lovingly, leads us along the road of reform. Step by step the error is corrected, and we are redeemed. The false concept of oneself as a weak, sinful mortal drops away by degrees. The Christ-idea begins to shine in us, revealing our original innocence as God's spiritual offspring. We're on our way home.

Don't we all travel the road of reform from time to time? Our true selfhood, man, is always in harmonious unity with God as His reflection. But to human sense, in different ways and varying degrees we appear to lose sight temporarily of our unity with divine Mind. We fall for the temptation of self-will, intellectual pride, or sensuality, for example, and strike out on our own. In other words, we pursue some phase of the belief in a life and mind apart from God. Ultimately, and sometimes painfully, we must find our way back to reality. We must rectify each specific error by humbly acknowledging our sin, learning that there is no real pleasure in evil, and gaining a deeper love for good, God.

The Christly way of salvation

Reform is the Christly way—indeed the only way—of salvation from sin. It comes through the redemptive influence of Christ, the true idea of God that Christ Jesus exemplified, acting in human consciousness to destroy material sense and reveal man as spiritual and Godlike. Through reform we learn to know and love God more; the focus of our lives shifts from self to divinity and love for mankind; we wake to our inherent goodness and prove our God-given ability to triumph over all evil.

St. Paul's life was radically transformed through Christ, changed from one of raging opposition to the Christ-idea, to absolute devotion and service to it. As we, like the apostle, respond to the light of Truth within, we too are impelled to change our ways. We find that "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.} The old, fleshly sense of self with its pride, revenge, envy, and lust dies. The "new" or spiritual idea—what we really are—is born in our thought, and lives. Mrs. Eddy explains it in this way: "With the spiritual birth, man's primitive, sinless, spiritual existence dawns on human thought,—through the travail of mortal mind, hope deferred, the perishing pleasure and accumulating pains of sense,—by which one loses himself as matter, and gains a truer sense of Spirit and spiritual man." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 17.}

Clearly, this new birth is a matter of deep, spiritual transformation—not one of psychological or physiological behavior modification. Hypnotism, drugs, shock treatments, or psychotherapy cannot redeem humanity from evil, and God needs no aid from material means to accomplish His purpose. Nothing less than thorough Christianization of thought through divine grace can bring permanent freedom from wrong. Healing comes not through a rearrangement of the human mind but from its regeneration by the purifying influence of the divine Mind, God.

The Christianly scientific basis for reform is the eternal truth that God made and maintains man in His own image and likeness, perfect and good in every way. From the distorted material viewpoint, however, it appears that man is both good and evil, and that evil frequently gets the better of him. But a frail, sinning, sick mortal is not God's representative; it is a counterfeit to be put off. As the Scriptures teach and Christian Science confirms, there really is only one kind of man—the man God has made; and identifying ourselves with this true idea brings healing.

As the expression of Soul, man is fully satisfied, joyous, at peace. As the idea of Spirit, he has no carnal nature to counteract spirituality. As the likeness of divine Mind, he cannot lapse into a state of material consciousness, or spiritual deadness, for he is completely awake to the truth. Living in the allness of Life, Truth, and Love, he cannot stray for an instant from his heavenly home, because as divine reflection he is eternally at one with his Principle, God.

Christ Jesus identified himself with God, not with the beliefs of the flesh. Thus he exemplified the indivisibility of Father and Son, God and His Christ. He knew that all true being is in and of God, and looking beyond physical appearances, he saw others as Love's perfect ideas. His was a ministry of tender, forgiving love, awakening the hearts of men and women to their own Christly nature. He illustrated the law of divine Love, which today as then is made manifest in human lives as redemption from every form of error, including sickness.

But what about suffering? If God is Love, why do we suffer from our sins? Because, through compliance with evil, we identify ourselves with that which must be punished and so destroyed. Though the individual is redeemed through Christ, sin is not spared Truth's consuming fire. Any suffering for sin that we experience, then, is not God-bestowed; it is self-inflicted. It ceases when the error is canceled through reform. However, suffering is beneficial so long as it serves to expose evil as self-destructive and thus turns us away from sin.

Meeting the demands of reform

Admitting that we've sinned is the essential first step along the way of reform. Fleshly indulgence dulls spiritual sense, our ability to distinguish between the real and unreal, between good and evil. But when we reach the point where we can honestly face the fact that a wrong is wrong, we're beginning to wake up from the stupor of material sense. We're beginning to think more clearly. We've opened the door to progress. Continued progress, however, requires more than recognition and remorse; it requires the understanding that there is no real pleasure in sin.

Jesus taught and demonstrated the revolutionary truth that there is no tangible reality in either the pains or the pleasures of material sense. The Master said, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." ^{John 6:63.} Life, health, and happiness are in Spirit, never in matter; in good, not in evil. There is nothing desirable about evil in any form, for evil is a denial of the existence of God. It is an affront to His supremacy.

Matter has no inherent life or intelligence, though it certainly seems to. The belief that it does is the source of all human ills, and the specific term that Christian Science assigns to this belief is "animal magnetism." Animal magnetism claims to be able to draw us away from our natural gravitation Spiritward; it claims to hypnotize us through fear of or fascination with matter. Acting from the impossible premise that being is separate from God, animal magnetism would persuade us to think and behave entirely contrary to good. Among other things, it would persuade us to imagine we can get along just fine without the moral and spiritual discipline of the Science of Christ.

If left unopposed in thought, animal magnetism seems to act as a negative force in our lives. But any apparent drawing power of evil depends entirely upon our willingness to believe corporeal sense. Without our consent, this false sense can't do a thing to get us off the track. Whether it claims to be able to harm or benefit us, in every instance evil, or matter, is an impotent illusion, for there is but one God, one power. This was a pivotal point in the theology of Jesus, as it is in Christian Science today; and it is the basis on which we can realize our full freedom from any error.

From this solid basis, then, we go on to prove our love for God. We take positive steps to correct our ways by doing good. Genuine repentance begins within, when the heart grows humble, loving, receptive to good. But actions are the real measure of our sincerity. The proof of atonement is a changed character, one that bears sparkling witness to the nature of divine Life, Truth, and Love. Do we really regret sin? Then, not only will we cease to indulge in it; we'll actually become more Christlike. We'll drop the crude characteristics of mortality and in their place let the divine nature appear. We'll be less self-centered, more honest, affectionate, compassionate—more spiritually-minded. Active good is practical repentance, which settles the debt of sin.

Persisting in our journey

As we make our way home to God on the road of reform, we shouldn't be discouraged or surprised if the journey seems hard at times. After all, deeply ingrained errors of thought are rarely given up without a struggle, and this may demand great patience and perseverance. To waste time in a self-defeating cycle of guilt and despair will buy us nothing. Yet, however tough the going may be, evil cannot ultimately succeed in resisting what is irresistible. Because Truth is true and eternal, evil is only supposititious and temporal. It must yield; it cannot hold out against the power of God. So the issue is never whether we can be healed, for healing is inevitable, but when human thought will yield to divine Mind.

We might ask ourselves: "How willing am I to let Christ transform my life? Am I happy to lose a personal, material sense of myself and gain the divine idea? Do I love God enough to strive earnestly for the Mind of Christ?" When we truly hunger and thirst for the things of Spirit, we're ready, even eager, to abandon the beliefs of the flesh, and we progress more rapidly.

St. Paul wrote, "It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." ^{Phil. 2:13.} God gives not only the desire but also the ability to do right. If you're at the point of wanting to change your ways but fear you haven't the strength to follow through, put your trust in God, the infinite. He won't fail you. Reach out to your Father-Mother in heartfelt prayer to know and love Him more, and you will see that you are not only worthy of redemption but able to overthrow sin decisively and turn your life around.

In its broadest sense, reformation is not something that takes place just once in a lifetime and that's that. Nor is it something to consider only when we've made a major mistake. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Sin exists here or hereafter only so long as the illusion of mind in matter remains." ^{Science and Health, p. 311.} So long as the dream of intelligent matter continues, the demand for reform will continue. In this context, then, the regeneration of the human self not only requires us to overcome the more obvious forms of sin. Regeneration includes a daily, hourly imperative to be wholly Christlike. It is our lifework.

In what we call human existence, reform—the realignment of thought and purpose with God—is essential. But in divine Science, God and man have an indestructible relationship and need no reconciliation. Divine Principle never rejects its own idea, nor can idea desert its Principle and exist on its own. That is a scientific impossibility. Although we may stray from the realization of this fact, the unity of God and man remains intact. And the clear realization of this unity is the ultimate goal in reform: the holy consciousness that as God's idea our true selfhood never really "left home"—the kingdom of heaven—in the first place.

The Saviour promised, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." ^{Matt. 5:6.} One Bible commentary provides this note on the word "filled": "i.e. shall attain completely to the character at which they aim." ^{J. R. Dummelow, The One-Volume Bible Commentary (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1936), p. 640 .} Through Christ's redeeming love, each and every one of us can reach the goal of demonstrating man's pure and Christlike nature, eternally coexistent with God.