Article August 26, 1922 Issue

The Beatitudes

BESSIE LEE HOWARD

There is but one way of admission to the kingdom of heaven, and that is through gaining that beatific consciousness of eternal harmony which Jesus, the great Way-shower for all mankind, has made so plain in his wonderful Sermon on the Mount. Little is recorded in the sacred Scriptures of the boyhood and young manhood of Jesus; and yet how consecrated his life must have been through all those years! How zealous he must have been in working out his individual problems as they were presented! We are convinced that he applied the truth he knew to every circumstance, and was what to-day we would call "a practitioner," for he never failed to practice the Science of Christianity.

When Jesus was twelve years of age, his parents took him to Jerusalem. On their return the child tarried behind; and when they sought him, as we read in the gospel according to Luke, they "found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions." When his parents inquired why he had remained behind, he answered, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" As a lad he realized what his life-work was to be,—that he had his own salvation to work out, and that he must himself lift up the Christ if he were to see all men drawn unto it.

During a period of thirty years we know practically nothing of Jesus' experiences, his trials, his wrestlings, or his achievements; but we know that through all those years he was working faithfully, untiringly, accepting as real all that was good and destroying in his consciousness all that was unlike God. During all those years he was thoroughly and completely fitting himself to be the Savior of the world; and we behold him during his three years' mission among men bestowing blessings and benedictions, while endeavoring to impart to mankind the simple truths he had made practical in his own life. His ambition, during his whole earthly career, was to lead men to God, to show them how to turn from a belief of life in matter to a realization of Life as Spirit, or God; how to rise from sense to Soul, from the mortal to the immortal. Through right thinking and right living he maintained so pure a consciousness that he was always what Mrs. Eddy calls, in her book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 295), a "transparency for Truth."

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