When Saul "saw the light" on the road to Damascus, ^{See Acts 9:1-20 .} he experienced what today we might call a turnaround. Within a very short time his overriding aim changed from attempting to suppress Christianity to promoting its sturdy growth. Up to that time he'd been doing what he thought was right—with a sense of righteousness based on the religious instruction he'd received as a highly educated Jew, a Pharisee. Now, filled with an overwhelmingly higher sense of right, he surrendered his own educated opinions to the Mind of Christ.

But Saul wasn't the only one who got turned around. The light that temporarily blinded him was the sudden illumination of his consciousness by Christ—the impartial Truth which, as Christ Jesus exemplified, destroys sickness and sin and works to overturn any form of bondage that a material sense of existence would impose on mankind. And Christ, Truth, causing Saul to submit humbly to a rebirth of purpose, must also have acted powerfully on his Christian contemporaries, turning around their persecution-educated views of him.

Ananias, divinely impelled to go to Saul, at first expressed a reluctance that must have been shared by most of his fellow Christians. Here was a man who, three days before, had been a much-feared enemy of Christianity, bent on capturing and bringing to trial all who followed Jesus' teachings. When Saul had caused so much suffering to Christians, was Ananias now supposed to go to his rescue? Certainly it must have seemed that at any moment this man might start persecuting them again. But Ananias, turned around also by the impartial Christ he served, obediently went to Saul, and Saul was healed of his blindness. In time, even the breach between Saul and the Christian leadership was also healed. And the Christians accepted their former enemy, under his name of Paul, as a brother and a leader of the Gentile mission.

The story of Paul's conversion, besides being a dramatic example of the power of Christ to overcome self-righteousness at an individual level, is thus the bearer also of an important message about the universal nature of the Christ. Lifting thought above the partisan viewpoints that seem so natural to mortals, Christ leads us to a higher level: toward the true concept of man as the spiritual image and likeness of God, divine Truth and Love. A turnaround impelled by Christ—a turning away from partisanship in obedience to the higher demands of universal Love—is thus never confined to the individual most directly affected. Truth, accepted and understood, not only can regenerate the individual but can help to awaken spiritually those in the realm of his thought, affecting even nations and generations to come.

The benefit brought to humanity by Paul's turnaround is immeasurable. Yielding submissively to a more spiritual view of righteousness, he became the most effective missionary of his day. His writings and works, pulsing with the vigor of this inspired vision, have acted as a powerful influence for good throughout the ages.

What can we learn today from what Paul and his fellow Christians learned so long ago? In a world apparently more than ever fragmented by partisan viewpoints, the need to know the Christ, which works impartially for the good of all, is clear. Sensing the inadequacy of human negotiation to resolve significant differences, many throughout the world are turning to God in prayer for peace, much as the early Christians must have prayed for relief from the persecution imposed on them by the self-righteousness that incited Saul prior to his conversion.

Prayer that recognizes the power of the creator to hold creation in accord with His universal law enables us to realize that, as Paul writes, "all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." ^{Rom. 8:28.} But the prayer that recognizes the creator's all-power must also discard partisanship in order to bring human experience into conformance with His righteousness and recognize the absolute impartiality of divine law, divine Science.

Mrs. Eddy writes, "Changes in belief may go on indefinitely, but they are the merchandise of human thought and not the outgrowth of divine Science." She continues in the next paragraph: "In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail themselves of God as 'a very present help in trouble.' Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals." ^{Science and Health, pp. 12-13.}

The infinite Love that is God knows no mixtures of right and wrong viewpoints. To be infinite, God can be only one. He can know and uphold only His own viewpoint: His absolute knowledge of creation's perfection. His all-power, appealed to and acknowledged, removes from human experience the false evidence of separation from God and His universal harmony—false evidence that mortals have wrongly come to believe is real. Having implicit confidence in the ability of this true idea of God's nature and power to make itself apparent brings healing. It erodes and will ultimately destroy the false sense of a reality in which things don't "work together for good": a mortal "reality" which divides, polarizes, and resists attempts at harmony and unity. While salvation is individual, such praying and the regeneration it inspires prepare the way for turnarounds in us, in others, in world leaders, and in nations—turnarounds that will bring right changes, causing self-righteousness to yield to God's will.

Mortality is a false, inverted image of God's immortal reality. Mrs. Eddy explains: "God creates and governs the universe, including man. The universe is filled with spiritual ideas, which He evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind that makes them." She goes on later, "Mortals are not like immortals, created in God's own image; but infinite Spirit being all, mortal consciousness will at last yield to the scientific fact and disappear, and the real sense of being, perfect and forever intact, will appear." ^{Ibid., p. 295.}

Regeneration requires many sacrifices of us as we put off mortality for immortality. But surely no sacrifice is more worthy or fruitful than the immolation of our own self-righteousness—the surrender of those merely human opinions about others' motives, aims, and desires that can seem so justifiably right and yet can be so utterly wrong.

As our own preconceptions yield to the viewpoint of the universal Christ, our purified consciousness will help in bringing about those turnarounds, those rebirths of spiritual outlook and purpose and the struggles to reform, that progressively awaken mankind to spiritual reality. And as that which is perfect becomes more and more apparent, we'll find ourselves ready to forgive the wrongs and partisanism of the past—our own as well as others'—and to nurture the development of Christliness in those we once believed were our enemies.