THERE was a time not so many years ago when, if one asked the reason for some so-called act of God, he was told that it was wrong to ask such a question, for no one could presume to understand a Being so great and mysterious as God. If the question were pushed, and it were asked, "How then did Jesus understand God?" the answer was that Jesus himself was Deity! To-day, men everywhere are learning to rejoice in the fact that Christ Jesus, as the most perfect man who ever walked the earth, did indeed understand his Father; and that whatever was possible to him is possible to us —that we also, as God's image and likeness, may understand God. The practical proof of this has come to us through Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.
The Bible does not tell us at just what age Jesus began to comprehend his heavenly mission as Way-shower; but we do know that by the time he was twelve he understood something of what lay before him, and was beginning to be consciously about his Father's business. His certainty that God alone was his Father helped him to lay aside material thoughts and desires. From that time in the temple when the eager boy listened to the learned doctors and asked and answered questions, through the eighteen years that passed before his public appearance, Jesus' thought, as he "grew, and waxed strong in spirit," could never have wavered from its steady dwelling with God. John the Baptist knew Christ Jesus at once as the Messiah when he appeared at Jordan to be baptized ; and John saw "the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove," and abiding upon him.
Jesus' public ministry began at the time of his baptism. Before he left the Jordan, John, Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael had become his disciples. Not long afterwards he was followed by a throng which, marveling at his words and works, would have made him a king. Jesus rejected that thought on the instant. Material power had no temptation for him whose perception had already pierced through the coming years to discern the path that lay ahead of him in his proving that man is spiritual, not material. He knew, even at the height of his popularity, that the fickle adulation of so-called mortals, ready now to cry "Hosanna," could be turned by crafty, malicious suggestion into that hoarse shout, "Crucify him. . . . Crucify him." When he told his disciples what lay before him, Peter in shocked surprise refused to believe his words, searching, perhaps, for some other mortal path by which he might escape the straight and narrow way of Truth that was leading to the cross. In the strongest words one friend ever used to another, Jesus rebuked the error which Peter voiced, and then turned to his disciples with the invitation to each one of them to deny mortal selfhood, take up whatever cross lay ahead, and follow him in the only way in which demonstration over that cross could be made— by laying down the false sense of material life and grasping the reality of spiritual life. "For what," he asked, "shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
