The gospel of the kingdom is the best news the world ever received, and for this reason Jesus the Christ proclaimed it, lived it, demonstrated it. From the altitude of his undimmed spiritual vision he discerned the kingdom as God's perfect creation,—a manifestation of Mind, in which the crowning glory is loving submission to the divine will, in response to the perpetual outgoing of Love's choicest blessings. Mortal thought has always pictured the kingdom as something very different from this, and will continue to do so until awakened from its illusions.
What Jesus meant by the kingdom can never be understood unless the thought about it is divorced from the material concept. His mission and his message are entirely misconceived of if it is forgotten that he was not in the least concerned about the mortal and the transient. These are qualities (so called) of matter, and matter to him was nothing; Spirit was all. To him the kingdom of God was spiritual, eternal, immortal, universal. It was the product of Mind and Mind only. It was man's real, permanent, and legitimate home, where the Father is,—the Father who is ever ready to welcome His children back to him,—as Jesus made clear in that gracious invitation, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." The key to the kingdom is the knowledge of the truth; and it is this knowledge which is acquired more clearly, scientifically, and spiritually through the teachings of Christian Science than at any time since the ascension of the personal Jesus.
What, therefore, in this way, does a man learn? First of all, that the rule of Mind is the reign of Christly character; that the kingdom of Mind is the domain of right, justice, purity, unselfishness, humility, love, wisdom; the perfect ideal this: the divine reality which has always existed. Its realization in human consciousness will be the consummation of all the highest human effort. But spiritual truth is unfolded and ripens slowly to human sense; hence it is that though nearly two thousand years have passed since Jesus of Nazareth opened "the kingdom of heaven to all believers," to use a phrase from the "Te Deum," humanity is still reluctant to enter in.
