Article November 14, 1936 Issue

Spiritual Citizenship

HELENA B. SHIPMAN

When Jesus commanded his disciples, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature," he did not speak of this world as composed of so many different states and political divisions. His concept of the world embraced universal humanity, for whom his vital message of the Christ, Truth, was to be the promised Messiah. While the Master's vision extended far beyond the physical universe into the kingdom of divine Mind with its spiritual ideas, yet his immortal teachings were neither vague nor hypothetical. Definite and progressive steps he laid down and demonstrated not only for his disciples but for posterity who would seek to establish citizenship in the spiritual kingdom.

How was this gospel of God's kingdom to be established on earth? That the change was not to be arrived at politically, and that the spiritual kingdom could not be ordained by physical force, is assured in the Master's declaration to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered: ... but now is my kingdom not from hence."

In an era of turmoil and conflict, fraught with political strife, racial hatreds, conflicting philosophical doctrines and religious dogmas, Jesus taught and demonstrated his revolutionary gospel of the healing Christ. As a pioneer in Christian citizenship he took for his staff and defense the Word of God. Searching the record of his earthly career, one is emphatically impressed with Jesus' knowledge of and utter reliance on the inspired Word of Scripture for his authority and vindication. Nowhere is this more strikingly demonstrated than in his early experience known as the temptation. In this ordeal he valiantly defended his sonship with the Father. In the first three Gospels Jesus is recorded as fasting forty days in the wilderness. Mary Baker Eddy defines "wilderness" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 597) thus: "Loneliness; doubt; darkness. Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence."

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