THE multitudes thronging Jesus of Nazareth as he went about on his healing, mission showed clearly the inherent longing in human thought for a more satisfying state of well-being than had yet been known. For many centuries that desire had been shaping itself and finding expression, to some extent at least, in both individual and group consciousness. Abraham, Moses, and others, realizing something of the nature of spiritual reality, became the religious teachers and leaders of the people of their time; but to replace material concepts with spiritual truths was found to be a difficult task.
What the world seems to want more than anything else is some method or system whereby it may be assured a measure of peace and happiness here on earth, and at the same time be protected in the use and enjoyment of those material pleasures that human appetites and passions seem to evolve! Through ignorance and willful disregard of the effects of the unrestrained indulgence of these appetites, which are the procuring cause of much human woe, mortals go on suffering, blindly seeking deliverance through matter.
Mankind has been slow in accepting and applying spiritual truth as a necessity to health and as a means of establishing a better sense of existence. Yet this was exactly what Jesus taught. His methods, however, were so strange and so disturbing to the human sense of things—interfering, as men thought, with so-called vested rights and privileges—that those in authority would have none of them. They said, "This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils." But Jesus' mission was to establish the kingdom of God on earth; and it was based on his understanding of spiritual creation. God. he taught, is Spirit, and man created in His image and likeness is spiritual, and is therefore free from the so-called laws of matter. He recognized that it is the material concept of man which in belief is enslaved, the enslavement having been brought about by the acceptance of the false sense of a material creation. Regardless of tradition or theory as to these falsities, he began the destruction of so-called material laws by destroying their evidence—sin, sickness, and death. Thus he proved that spiritual law supersedes human theories, and breaks down mortal mind's most cherished beliefs.
