Editorial March 28, 1970 Issue

Life's Embrace of Humanity

Helen Wood Bauman

Christians should always be growing in their understanding of the mission of Christ Jesus—his life, his teachings, his healing works, his crucifixion and resurrection, and his final ascension above the mortal sense of existence. Christian Science explains that throughout his brief experience on earth Jesus was proving that man is not a mortal, separated from God, or Principle, but the immortal expression of the one Father, divine Life, and inseparable from Him forever.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mary Baker Eddy interprets the message of John, the Revelator, who pictures this inseparability in his figure of the bride and the Lamb (see Rev. 21:9), as Principle and its idea coming to earth from heaven. She interprets further: "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."^{Science and Health, p. 561;}

The man God created is sinless and incorporeal, the likeness of Spirit. On the other hand, the human self expresses a dual state, including good and evil, truth and error. In the measure that one is purified of sin and of the temptations of materialism, he is able to experience Life's embrace. God includes the elements He creates, and supports and blesses them. Without purification one finds himself cut off from God by the wall of material consciousness, the false sense that knows not God. Many people, feeling this separation, decide that this is an era when Deity is not active in human life or even that God is absent. Others adopt the doctrine of hope, the belief that a new age can be expected in the future.

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