Every Christian and especially the student of Christian Science finds a profitable experience as the Christmas season rolls around each year, in contemplating the deep significance of the event which it commemorates. Such a review, of necessity, deals for the most part with the life and mission of Jesus the Christ. This study, however cursory, leads to a consideration of the prophecies of the Old Testament in their relation to the coming of the Saviour and Messiah; and when the ancient Scriptures are recognized as the history of a race many of whose leaders were naturally endowed with a degree of spirituality far above their times, struggling upward from the very depths of materialism toward the light of understanding, they take on a new significance.
To be sure, through all this long and tedious course there were spiritually-minded prophets and seers who led the way. Divine Principle, then as now, had its witnesses. Christ, Truth, was as ever present and available before the coming of the Nazarene as after, and even though the masses of the Hebrew race now and then lost their vision, turning away to worship the golden calves of materiality, the prophets held to their vision, true and undismayed. And, although the final advent of the Saviour was in a manner far from what they had anticipated, how clearly did they foresee and how accurately did they foretell the coming of the Messiah!
During all the centuries from Isaiah to Malachi, the concept of the Messiah unfolded as Christ, Truth, found its way into human consciousness. God, through His Christ, the divine idea, found increasing witness, until there appeared one whose concept of divine fatherhood was so clear, so certain, that she brought forth the infant Jesus. The birth at Bethlehem was the most important event in human history. God did, indeed, give "his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Not that God was cognizant of a material or sinning world, or of a material babe born in a stable and cradled in a manger; but the divine idea, Christ, Truth, finding its way progressively into human consciousness and sent of God because an emanation from Him, culminated in the event of the Saviour's birth. Thus Jesus had the advantage of a virgin motherhood. He was literally the son of God because of his divine Father; and the son of man because born of Mary. This enabled him to demonstrate the power of Spirit over matter in a degree at once unprecedented and unparalleled. Tempted of evil, of material sense, in the ways common to mankind, he resisted all the machinations of the so-called mortal mind, even in its most subtle forms, and rose in spiritual consciousness until he was able to extricate himself from the belief of death and the tomb. Then, so completely did he rise above the material sense of man that he no longer was visible to the so-called physical senses.
