Spiritual relationship versus the human

“Before Abraham was, I am” established for all time a new understanding of Life without, beginning or end of days. This statement carried with it the implication, which aroused the wrath of the materially minded Israelites when Jesus the Christ launched it in their midst, that he antedated Abraham. According to their understanding, which was grossly material, a mortal man was claiming to have been alive in the flesh hundreds of years, when, according to the evidence of the senses he was still young. Thus they accused him of fraud, little understanding that his statement was a great metaphysical fact, claiming spiritual life alone as his, and thereby acknowledging God alone as his creator, which shut out all the human sense of life, including birth and death, as well as the human sense of relationship.

When, in the twelfth chapter of Matthew, after being told that his mother and his brethren were waiting without, Jesus of Nazareth asked, “Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?” he propounded a question that should have startled a sleeping world out of its dream of life in matter, had it not been so content to go on sleeping, and had it not been fearful that in awakening from its mesmerism it would suffer some loss in giving up its false trusts. In the next verse Jesus gave the answer to his own question which clearly elucidated the basis from which he argued. “Behold my mother and my brethren!” he exclaimed, as he stretched out his hand toward his disciples, “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” The metaphysical fact thus brought to light has been made available to mankind through the understanding unfolded in the study of Christian Science, and the student soon learns that instead of being deprived of his relations, he is only losing, or more properly speaking he is giving up, the false human sense, and is gaining the true spiritual sense, which brings to his awakening consciousness the realization of the true relationship of Principle and its idea, man, whereby he has added to his knowledge the true sonship, and the real brotherhood, of the sons and daughters of God.

The accusation of the Pharisees that Jesus made himself the Son of God, was his justification. He claimed nothing for himself but that which was his by inheritance as the Son of God. “From him,” Mary Baker Eddy writes in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (p. 316 ), “mortals may learn how to escape from evil. The real man being linked by Science to his Maker, mortals need only turn from sin and lose sight of mortal selfhood to find Christ, the real man and his relation to God, and to recognize the divine sonship. Christ, Truth, was demonstrated through Jesus to prove the power of Spirit over the flesh,—to show that Truth is made manifest by its effects upon the human mind and body, healing sickness and destroying sin.”

Christian Science has come, after all these centuries of darkened understanding, to throw the light of spiritual discernment upon the greatest of Jesus’ teachings, that man as the son of God is expressing his only relationship that thereby he admits the only real inheritance there is or can be, that of the spiritual idea taking its nature from Spirit, governed by Principle, the law of Spirit, Mind. This knowledge spontaneously annihilates the belief of any material, human, mortal mind law of inheritance hanging about the neck of mortal man the millstones of temperament, physical disability, inherited tastes and tendencies, weaknesses physical and moral, from which seemingly there was no escape. As the study of Christian Science is pursued it is soon learned that by replacing the false testimony of the physical senses with the spiritual facts of being, freedom from the supposititious laws of matter, which apparently held man captive throughout the ages, is gained. The student finds authority on page 215 of Science and Health for his new hope, for Mrs. Eddy has written: “With its divine proof, Science reverses the evidence of material sense. Every quality and condition of mortality is lost, swallowed up in immortality. Mortal man is the antipode of immortal man in origin, in existence, and in his relation to God.”

Because he learns that reversal in Christian Science means exchanging mortal beliefs for immortal facts, and that in so doing he gains divine proof, such as the healing of sin and disease, the student of this exact Science makes it his business to put this reversing into practice in his every relationship. The glorious realization comes to him that all that man can inherit is good.

The inseparability of Mind and idea constitutes man’s relationship to God, the Father. His inheritance, therefore, is dependent upon his close relationship to good, God, and his living in conformity to the laws of Love, of Truth, and of Life. Mortal man has attempted to make the heir inherit through the belief of blood proximity, substituting physical relationship for the spiritual, which alone can express the true sense of kinship. Understanding that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he, takes his inheritance out of the realm of matter, and makes available the true basis of his relationship to divine Principle, for as a man’s thinking grows more spiritual, he exchanges things for thoughts and takes possession of his real inheritance, “the substance of things hoped for,” incapable of destruction. Then for the first time he sees man as the heir to the promise, and co-heir with Christ, Truth, at one with the Father, who is all substance and the only consciousness.

As a man recognizes this true relationship he realizes that man is the son of God, therefore the true being of all men and women is alike in this relationship to Principle, and this constitutes the true brotherhood of man. The second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” then makes plain what a man’s duty is, to replace the false estimate of man as sinful, sickly, and earthly, by the recognition of man as the image and likeness, the son, of God, so that he inherits equally with his brother all that God bestows; for whatever he would claim for himself as his inalienable right by virtue of his inheritance, is equally shared by all men, for man according to the law of Spirit, is created free,—free to share equally with all other ideas in this spiritual relationship, the only relationship there is.