The greatest spiritualizing movements in the world's history have had their inception in the life of some individual. This might, on first thought, seem to be due to superior personal qualifications for leadership, as is usually the case where extensive military or commercial exploits are concerned. A more careful scrutiny, however, shows that those religious leaders whose efforts have been productive of great and lasting results, owed their prestige to the fact that they were ready channels for the divine idea in its insistent appeal to human consciousness. This was preeminently true of Jesus of Nazareth, whose career exemplified the power of a supreme faith in God. So mighty was his faith that it was projected beyond the pale of environing problems, until it contemplated the redemption of all mankind from the bondage of material belief.
The consecutive unfolding of a demonstrable knowledge of God, a knowledge of which the Nazarene Prophet's faith was the culmination, may be said to have dated from Abraham, "the father of the faithful." He it was who first apprehended in its purity the monotheistic ideal, which, broadening and deepening in the religious experience of succeeding generations, took shape at length in the exalted concept of Messiahship presented in the writings of Isaiah. So material, however, was the thought of the age, that Isaiah's vision of the Christ seemed little more than a fanciful dream until centuries later. Then, at a time when the Messianic hopes of the Hebrew race were focused on the coming of a temporal ruler after the type of David, one who should deliver his people from the yoke of their political oppressors, the Galilean peasant, Jesus, prepared for this work from before his birth, grasped the spiritual meaning of the ancient prophecy and conceived the possibility of fulfilling its requirements in his own life. From the glimpse of his boyhood afforded by the episode in the temple at the age of twelve, it is evident that he had even thus early begun to realize something of the liberating experiences that were in store for the race through a right apprehension of God.
The sense of sonship with the Father grew upon Jesus as time went on, until at the beginning of his public ministry faith had passed beyond the stage of mere conviction and entered the field of actual demonstration. The consciousness of God as ever at hand, as a presence seen, heard, felt, known, experienced spiritually, enabled him to bring out in concrete form the ideal which Isaiah had portrayed in the abstract. He was fully and definitely aware that the Father's ways of manifesting Himself were entirely spiritual, and that therefore the modes of belief commonly designated as material laws owe their seeming existence and authority to ignorance and perverted education. Consequently the spiritual idea projected through the lens of his pure consciousness, reproduced harmonious and normal conditions where the aberrations of belief had presented distorted images in the form of disease, immorality, and all manner of ungodliness.
