Christian Science is renderingthe highest possible service to men by bringing them a new realization that the consciousness of God, of Truth and Love, constitutes the only sense of life worth while, and having accepted this teaching as true, the gain of a demonstrably right concept of the divine nature, purposes, and manifestations becomes at once the supremely vital thing. From the mortal point of view, however, this God-knowing life is forever unattainable. The sense of incapacity leads very many to accept the unknow-ability of God as an inevitable conclusion, and to look upon the idealism of Christ Jesus as the iridescent dream of a most sincere and lovable visionary; nevertheless, that men are able to form a concept of God which presents an utter contrast to human nature, witnesses that this higher consciousness of supreme moments is the dawn of spiritual perception; that although consciousness seems to be so largely mortal and material, human nature has an element of real good, an aspiration for and likeness to God. Christ Jesus constantly appealed to this spiritual factor in human consciousness, and because of it legitimately taught his followers to address God as "our Father."
This fact of the at-one-ment, in a prophetically saving degree, of the human with the divine, and of the corresponding responsiveness of awakened thought to Truth, together with the further fact that this capacity may, as the Master taught, be cultivated and enlarged, gives the problem of human redemption an entirely new perspective. We begin to understand that as, in keeping with a universal law, like produces like, so also like is perceived and apprehended only by like, and that our individual consciousness of good desire furnishes a ground of satisfying assurance and perennial praise. Said the Master, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled;" and his unequivocal teaching that if we would be immortal we must know God, is thus correlated with the witness of our spiritual aspiration and intuition to this exalted possibility.
That our consciousness is human and not divine makes it apparent that aside from its attainment through spiritual intuition, the truth can reach us only as it is presented to us in conformity with our present mental modus; otherwise it cannot be apprehended. This explains the use which the Master made of the parable that supplied him a channel through which the truth could find place and assimilation in the human understanding. Every educational system is trying to present the unknown in terms of the known. Every effort to explain brings some increment of experience into use to make more clear the as yet unexperienced, and this constitutes the wisdom of Mrs. Eddy in using varied, though coordinate and in large degree synonymous terms to express her scientific concept of God.
