FOR centuries, Christians have celebrated, at the annual Easter season, the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the grave. What this stupendous miracle has meant to human hearts could be described only by depicting the endless beliefs and hopes and superstitions attaching to the event. All agree, however, on the important point that Jesus' conquest of the belief of death is vitally connected with humanity's hope of salvation. Yet, even many of those who have been most sincerely convinced that Christians should follow the great Exemplar, have not clearly seen how the resurrection can be a practical help in daily problems; and so, history's supreme event has been widely regarded as a sign of vicarious redemption.
Christ Jesus repeatedly declared himself "the way," "the resurrection, and the life," demanding that his followers should emulate him in all respects, doing, eventually, as he said they should do, "greater works" than those he had himself performed. It is the practical, ever operative power of the living Christ, Truth, which alone can make Jesus' teachings of avail to humanity. This view, which Christian Science presents, is emphasized in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 292), where Mrs. Eddy says, "Truth will be to us 'the resurrection and the life' only as it destroys all error and and the belief that Mind, the only immortality of man, can be fettered by the body, and Life be controlled by death."
It is to be remembered that Jesus' resurrection from the experience of death came as the culmination of an unparalleled succession of triumphs over what had seemed to men insurmountable material conditions. His mission was to reveal God to men. Spiritually endowed above all others, he perceived what the coming of the Christ to the flesh would effect; and he proceeded to prove in all points, and step by step, the presence and the power of the divine manifestation of God. He was to prove that Life, Truth, and Love overcome sin, disease, and death, to show that because God is All, there is no actual material existence. Jesus spent three years in making plain what was eternally the unchanging truth of being, and left his example to be followed in humanity's great need to rise above and overcome all false sense of materiality.
