Editorial August 23, 1913 Issue

THE CHRIST-COMING

John B. Willis

Mortal sense is gregarious; it loves to live in the mass as well as to think in platitudes. It is habitually predisposed to consider the life-problem as a world-problem, rather than a personal problem, and thus to live without rather than within. How manifest this is today in that love of glare and blare which leads to urban congestion and the astonishing increase and patronage of places of cheap amusement, where novel and ingenious means of sense excitation feed and nourish the disposition to run with the multitude into forgetfulness of the individual task and the individual need!

This instinct has always had to do with the existent thought of human redemption, and with the method of bringing it about. The unit of desire and aspiration among all peoples has been a family, a clan, a nation. How marked this was in the Hebrew race! In reading the Old Testament one is impressed with the prominence, the extent of the rule, of the tribal consciousness. Here pride and aspiration and hope were always in conjunction. Upon this field the Messiah was to appear as the leader of a great spectacular triumph, and the chief offense of Christ Jesus to his own people inhered in the fact that he did not fall in with this expectation. His continuous appeal to the individual, his localization of struggle and triumph, the establishment of God's kingdom in the human heart, not only brought his countrymen disappointment, it excited their anger. To most of them he was altogether lacking in patriotism, loyalty to the great national issue, and they therefore cried out, "Away with him." The one thing that made him most trying and unacceptable was his insistence upon that thought of the human problem which is reemphasized by Mrs. Eddy when she says, "The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love" (Science and Health, p. 288).

That the Jewish sense of the Messianic appearing and leadership remained to affect Christian teaching in no inconsiderable degree, is seen in the thought which seems to have obtained with the disciples as to the Lord's second coming. Jesus' words, "Then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory," were manifestly interpreted by some with a literalness which begot a sense of human redemption which is in marked contrast with that conveyed by the "great voice" heard by St. John in Patmos, saying, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." Whatever else the Master's declarations may mean as to his future kingdom, the heart of his second coming, as he made clear, and as Christian Science teaches, is the apprehension and rule of the Christ-idea in individual consciousness. The phenomena of this experience, when it becomes universal, may be fittingly described in all the color and movement of oriental symbolism, but the basic fact is always an individual event.

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