ANOTHER Christmas season has come and gone and the dawn of a new year is upon us. These anniversaries never come without asking us momentous questions as to our progress,—whether the Christ to whom we professedly open our doors at Christmas-tide has remained with us, a welcome guest, throughout the year, so that our concept of Immanuel has grown until we no longer think of him as a babe in swaddling-clothes, but of the divine manhood enthroned in our consciousness as God with us, the "Wonderful, Counselor, . . . The Prince of Peace."
As the true concept of God is scientifically understood, we come to measure ourselves and others by a new standard. It is a common occurrence to hear mortals claim for deformity, ignorance, and even vice, a divine origin, while admitting that it is difficult to see the divine image and likeness in the midst of such conditions. They fail to see that even physical strength and beauty may give no hint of the divine likeness, which must be found in the godlike qualities that prove "the everlasting Father."
Too long has the world believed in a God far removed from human need,—the author of cruel material laws which had to be miraculously suspended in order that justice and mercy might heal some sufferers in the days of Jesus of Nazareth, but which have been in force ever since. It has also been believed that the character of Christ Jesus was not the "express image" of the Father,—that he was more loving and merciful, and that when occasion required he annulled or suspended the Father's laws, as when he healed the sick and sinful and raised the dead; this, too, in spite of his own declaration, "I am not come to destroy [the law], but to fulfil." In Christian Science we learn that it was his knowing of God and spiritual law and his obedience to both which enabled him to do the works that are now understood and valued at their inestimable worth through Mrs. Eddy's discovery of the divine Principle of his words and works—the Principle of infinite being.
