Article August 21, 1909 Issue

If there is anything certain about the teaching of Christ Jesus...

Frederick Dixon

Bath (Eng.) Herald.

If there is anything certain about the teaching of Christ Jesus, it is the way in which he dwelt upon the possibilities of the present. "This is life eternal," he said, "that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," words which distinctly declare that it was possible for man to gain this knowledge in this present life, since, as he explained at another time, "the kingdom of God is within you," or "in the midst of you." "This kingdom of God," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 576 of Science and Health, "'is within you,'—is within reach of man's consciousness here, and the spiritual idea reveals it." The understanding of the spiritual idea is that knowledge of the truth which Christ Jesus declared would make men free.

The opposition which the gospel of Christ met with in the first century is very like the opposition which Christian Science is meeting today, in the determined criticism of its theology and the repudiation of its healing. So long as the healing continued, the primitive church remained an outcast, for the healing necessitated the denial of materiality and required the sustained spiritual alertness necessary for the realization of man's true spiritual selfhood. The full significance of this dawns slowly upon the human consciousness, for, in order to understand the utter nothingness of any delusion it is necessary to understand the whole truth. This was surely what Paul meant when he wrote to the church in Corinth, "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face." Paul knew well enough that the things which he saw about him were enigmas which he was only partially able to understand. But he knew also that the more he acquired of the Mind of Christ, the clearer his appreciation of the spiritual would become, and that for the misconception of the spiritual seen through the blurred mist of the material senses, there would be substituted man formed in the image and likeness of God.

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