Article February 16, 1918 Issue

The Coming of the Christ

ELIZABETH A. M. COWAN

Christian people everywhere are apt to assume that if they had been alive when Jesus was on earth they would have been among his followers. Even in the time of Jesus, however, the recognition of the Christ came only to a very limited number of those who were brought into contact with Jesus. On the other hand the Christ-idea had come in much earlier ages to individuals who had never seen the personal Jesus. The real interest of the Bible history lies in the glimpses it affords of the spiritual idea unfolding itself in the consciousness of individuals, and in this way reaching out to and molding the thought of a nation.

Thus divine Truth came to Abraham as he sat at his door at noonday. An exalted idea of life appeared to him, which his receptive thought, already prepared for the revelation, at once went out to meet, and, bowing himself with his material beliefs of age and material law to the ground, in meekness he entertained the angel—the spiritual sense of being. Man's sonship with God was then revealed to him, and the son of man was lifted up in his consciousness. It was an angel or message from God that showed this to him. At the same time the spiritual idea of man dawned in some faint degree on the consciousness of Sarah also. She "heard" the message, and when later it returned to and took form in her consciousness, Isaac, the child of promise, was born. The birth of Isaac, was not a miracle, but a link in the chain of scientific demonstration. It was part of the gospel "preached before" unto Abraham, as Paul tells us in Galatians. To some extent it may have prepared the thought of the children of Israel to understand the birth of Jesus the Christ; to some extent it may lead our own thought also toward that more spiritual understanding of man which we celebrate on Christmas day.

It came to Moses in that great revelation of the burning bush, when he perceived the indestructible nature of the spiritual idea which the fires of earth had no power to touch. Through this experience Moses was led to the perception of the spiritual nature of reality. God became to him the "I am," the only true being, and thenceforth he devoted his life to the work of emancipating the struggling desires for good from the bondage of material sense, and of uplifting the spiritual idea to its true place in human consciousness, where it became the leader and deliverer of men. For Moses, as for every man, it was no light task to identify himself with the spiritual idea in such a degree as to lose sight of his mortal selfhood with all its idiosyncrasies and limitations, but Moses was able to perceive that when this seeming sacrifice of self had been accomplished, the service of God would be no longer in the valley but from the mountain top of spiritual vision and dominion. Thus he became for all time the forerunner and embodiment of that "worship of God in Spirit instead of matter" (Science and Health, p. 200) which began with the law and was perfected through Christ Jesus in the gospel.

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