Jesus came announcing Truth, and saying not only "the kingdom of God is at
hand," but "the kingdom of God is within you." Hence there is no sin, for
God's kingdom is everywhere and supreme, and it follows that the human
kingdom is nowhere, and must be _unreal_. Jesus taught and demonstrated
the infinite as one, and not as two. He did not teach that there are two
deities,--one infinite and the other finite; for that would be impossible.
He knew God as infinite, and therefore as the All-in-all; and we shall know
this truth when we awake in the divine likeness. Jesus' true and conscious
being never left heaven for earth. It abode forever above, even while
mortals believed it was here. He once spoke of himself (John iii. 13) as
"the Son of man which is in heaven,"--remarkable words, as wholly opposed
to the popular view of Jesus' nature.
The real Christ was unconscious of matter, of sin, disease, and death, and
was conscious only of God, of good, of eternal Life, and harmony. Hence the
human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and
there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and
royalty of his being,--holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as
real. It was this retreat from material to spiritual selfhood which
recuperated him for triumph over sin, sickness, and death. Had he been as
conscious of these evils as he was of God, wherein there is no
consciousness of human error, Jesus could not have resisted them; nor could
he have conquered the malice of his foes, rolled away the stone from the
sepulchre, and risen from human sense to a higher concept than that in
which he appeared at his birth.
Mankind's concept of Jesus was a babe born in a manger, even while the
divine and ideal Christ was the Son of God, spiritual and eternal. In
human conception God's offspring had to grow, develop; but in Science his
divine nature and manhood were forever complete, and dwelt forever in the
Father. Jesus said, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power
of God." Mortal thought gives the eternal God and infinite consciousness
the license of a short-lived sinner, to begin and end, to know both evil
and good; when evil is temporal and God is eternal,--and when, as a sphere
of Mind, He cannot know beginning or end.
The spiritual interpretation of the vicarious atonement of Jesus, in
Christian Science, unfolds the full-orbed glory of that event; but to
regard this wonder of glory, this most marvellous demonstration, as a
personal and material bloodgiving--or as a proof that sin is known to the
divine Mind, and that what is unlike God demands His continual presence,
knowledge, and power, to meet and master it--would make the atonement to be
less than the _at-one-ment_, whereby the work of Jesus would lose its
efficacy and lack the "signs following."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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