IT would seem that the student of Christian Science, in his endeavor to understand the Christ-idea, has first to look beyond the personal Jesus of Nazareth to the God-presence which Jesus so fully expressed. He must distinguish between the son of Mary and the Christ, Truth, which possessed the Master as sunlight floods through a window-pane. Further, the Christian Scientist sees that only as he lets the same Christ, Truth, possess him, governing and transforming his thinking, is he coming into any measure of salvation for himself.
After one gets under way in his own demonstration of the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus," he comes to comprehend and love Jesus himself as never before. He who most proved the present immortality of man, who lived to its fullness the life which reflects God, becomes very near and dear to the one who strives in our day to follow his example. As actual Christlikeness enters the heart, there is laid aside something of the technical, the literal—something of the letter that kills. So the Christian Scientist comes more into the spirit of what Mrs. Eddy, on page 351 of her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," calls "the living, palpitating presence of Christ, Truth, which healed the sick." And in coming into this Christ-presence one naturally comes to have a better appreciation of the beloved Jesus, who loved and lived the Christ. The centuries between disappear from thought. Down the ages comes a bright highway of the loving life of Jesus of Nazareth, a sunlit highway, bringing into our lives and affections a truer sense of the Master. The New Testament records have marvelously preserved for us a great deal of the life, the teaching, and the deeds of the master Christian. Because we have his teaching and the record of his work, we have him and know him. They are glowing records through which we may always have him with us.
When we can think of Jesus, the sanctified Way-shower, as inseparable from the Christ, Truth, and at the same time lose the sense of the intervening centuries in our conscious unity with his daily life, we come closer to that in him for which we ourselves have to reach out. The two thousand years of time should disappear from our thinking. Surely, it is not sacrilegious to think what Jesus of Nazareth would do here, now; to think of him as though preaching on our hillsides, healing the sick and the sinner, yes, raising the dead, in the very streets of our cities in which we move to-day. He lived in such a city of his time, did his work in its streets, slept under its roofs, broke bread with his friends, and healed them.
