The Old Testament being a history of the process of the establishment in the minds of men, through signs and wonders and great deliverances, of the existence of a supreme and omnipotent creator, so in the New Testament, in the life and words of Jesus the Christ, is written an unfolding vision of Truth and the unknown things of God, which yields its secret perfume to each successive mount of spiritual growth or achievement, until at last, as an unfolding rose bares its heart, so to the eyes of the seeker is laid bare the heart of the divine compassionate Father, and the truth-seeker realizes that which has heretofore been unknown to him, or but faintly perceived,—that in Christ Jesus we have beheld the Father,—a perception of that Truth, that incomprehensible, that unbelievable Love and mercy and compassion which they of his day were not able to bear. Are we, indeed, fully able?
The God of Jesus' teaching and demonstration in the healing of disease and the forgiveness of sin, was a God of such divine effulgence and mercy and love that the materialistic Pharisees could not bear the concept. They could not bear the apparent undoing of that which had transpired on the smoking Sinai, and of that which had most deeply wrought upon their sensibilities—the just anger of its great and terrible Jehovah. In Jesus, the gates of heaven apparently swung lightly open to the lowly, to the recent and flagrant violators of the Mosaic law, to those outside the pale of caste and power and wealth, even of Judaic descent; and though Jesus taught them plainly of the Father,—"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (i.e., spiritually),—yet were they not able because of their hardness of heart to apprehend a true concept of God. "Love, whose other name is God," was not yet enthroned,—the letter but not the spirit of the law had been accepted.
The greatest service that one man can render to another is to help him to a more enlightened concept of God, for the simple reason that God is absolute Truth; therefore the only true thinking would consist in thinking (reflecting) God's thoughts. A man's concept of God is basic; it bases all his thought, and only as his concept of God is a correct one will he be able to think correctly (think the truth) about anything. The so-called thinking, therefore, which is not based on truth (the enlightened concept of God), is not thinking at all, but is a mere distorted reflection of truth as it appears to consciousness, and has no entity because its image is reflected from a belief of matter as life; it is simply error,—has, in conformity to its assumed organic base, no enduring consciousness as measured by absolute Truth, by which all things soon or late must be tested. Like a false statement in a mathematical problem, a factor which is not subject to correction by the basic law of mathematics because untrue, error—untrue thinking—must be eliminated, destroyed, in the human equation before there can be harmony—the natural operation of truth. Thus a man's concept of God becomes the determining factor in all the affairs of his life, for to know God aright is eternal life. To obtain that true concept of God, therefore, is to possess that truth which shall make us free, which is by its very nature the most vitally important work that pertains to life.
