PURE Christianity's teaching is that God is Spirit; His kingdom a mental abode in the affections of man; His reign a glorious and everlasting one; that the signs or fruits of the kingdom are found in the exercise of divine qualities, such as spiritual activity, goodness, righteousness, truthfulness, love; and that the citizens of the kingdom are men and women under the control of supreme wisdom, reflecting God's power in intelligent and loving dominion over God's lesser ideas. Even while he tarried among men St. John's vision certainly took in this view of God's kingdom as here and now, and it was John's scientifically normal, God-bestowed gift of sight, so far transcending a limited material belief of seeing, that inspired his words found in Revelation: "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever."
Christian Science, moreover, furnishes a joy-bestowing revelation to this age, a fact of great import; namely, that St. John's illumined consciousness was no personal gift from God to a favored one, but that this divine consciousness, blotting out all sense of imperfection, is to become universal. Mrs. Eddy bears witness to her spiritual sense of the perfectibility of man, and to the naturalness of good in the real man, as follows: "I believe in the individual man, for I understand that man is as definite and eternal as God, and that man is coexistent with God, as being the eternally divine idea. This is demonstrable by the simle appeal to human consciousness" (Unity of Good, p. 49).
In early childhood inklings of the presence of God's kingdom often appear in the child's thought, creating a longing to be good, sometimes expressed by the little one in asking to be forgiven, followed by the frequent "I want to be good, mother." A tiny child once said, "Aren't we glad, mother, there is One who never makes a mistake?"
