Article June 23, 1917 Issue

The Second Coming of Christ

FRANK H. SPRAGUE

Perhaps none of our Master's recorded utterances have led to greater speculation than have the series of word pictures in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew, which deal with the coming of the Son of man. Knowing that he would soon be parted from his students, and realizing how imperfectly they grasped the vital issue of Spirit versus matter which he had striven unremittingly to bring home to their understanding, the great Teacher rose to the occasion with a burst of prophetic eloquence which swept the horizon of material concepts and unmasked the claim of mortal existence in all its hideousness.

Jesus, taking his text from the disciples' worldly observations concerning the magnificence of the temple buildings, first opened their eyes to the appalling catastrophe which was about to overtake "Israel after the flesh" because of the spiritual blindness of its leaders. Then, passing to broader phases of the subject, he depicted in the glowing imagery of oriental metaphor events which were destined to transpire on a grander scale at the reappearing to human apprehension of Christ, defined by Mrs. Eddy as "the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error" (Science and Health, p. 583). We may well imagine his hearers' astonishment when he whom they had learned to know as "The Prince of Peace" associated the coming of the Christ with scenes of turbulence and disaster of the most terrible description. What logical connection could there be between occurrences so diametrically opposite in their nature?

In response to the disciples' query as to the sign of his coming and "the end of the world," the Master in a series of illuminating parables foretold the doom of matter. Unlike the two other Greek words translated "world" in the New Testament, one of which denotes the physical earth and the other the order of the universe, the word used in this instance conveys, as its derivation implies, a sense of duration, and it is sometimes rendered "age." From the standpoint of ordinary theological interpretation, the meaning of these parables seems more or less vague and mystical. Christian Science, however, furnishes the key to our Lord's treatment of the subject in the startling disclosure that the matter-world, so obviously real to the physical senses, is a perverted image of God's creation, a suppositional order fathered by the mesmerism of corporeal sense, and it has therefore neither Principle, reality, nor permanence. In this drama of unreality the material belief of tranquillity passes for true peace, which is spiritual, until corporeal sense, urged to the limit of self-deception by the judgment of Truth, experiences a reaction in the aggravation of peace disturbing beliefs.

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