"DIVINITY EMBRACING HUMANITY"

H. PHELPS GATES

Important to good healing work is a practical, usable understanding of what Christian Science teaches of the coincidence of the human and divine. This vital point is a very simple, easy one even for the beginner to grasp. Yet what perplexing ambiguities are sometimes employed to explain it!

A good place to begin the study of what is meant by the coincidence, or the coming together, of the human and the divine is provided in the definitions of Christ and Jesus given by Mary Baker Eddy in the Glossary of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." It is significant that the one point of coincidence in these two definitions is in their reference to the destruction of error. The definitions read (p. 583): "Christ. The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error," and (p. 589), "Jesus. The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea, rebuking and destroying error and bringing to light man's immortality." Wherever and whenever there is coincidence of the human and divine, error is destroyed and to that degree corporeality disappears. It is in the realm of human experience that the divine manifestation of God comes to destroy error, to wipe out sin, disease, and death. It is in the daily journey Christward that Jesus' teachings can be made practical through the destruction of error and through the realization of man's immortality as divine idea.

Speaking of the Apostle John on page 561 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes: "To John, 'the bride' and 'the Lamb' represented the correlation of divine Principle and spiritual idea, God and His Christ, bringing harmony to earth. John saw the human and divine coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and its demonstration,—reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which is God. In divine revelation, material and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood."

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