ALL that pertains to and characterizes Life likewise pertains to and characterizes Truth. Truth and Life are synonymous. Truth is Life, and Life is Truth. Truth, therefore, never had a beginning, nor will it ever have an end. It is eternal, infinite. And because Truth is infinite, it is omnipresent, universal, immortal, divine. Truth does not vary. It does not fluctuate. It does not increase or diminish. It is immutable, changeless. There is not more of Truth at one time than at another, in one period than in another, in one age than in another. Truth is not concerned with age or with ages. All that was ever true is now and always will be true. Truth is self-existent. No one ever created or invented the least idea of Truth. All the ideas which constitute the infinitude of Truth, or God, have always existed. They are coexistent with their divine Principle, or Mind. Therefore these ideas cannot be created; they can only be discovered and revealed. No person, no individual, no group of individuals, ever originated the least particle of Truth. The infinitude of right or true ideas was with God "in the beginning," in the eternal unity and perfection of being.
Various individuals in different ages have perceived or discerned the Christ, or true idea of God, which has always existed. As Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 333), "Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea,—the reflection of God,—has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth." So Truth did not originate with Jesus. He discerned and demonstrated that which had always existed, but which had not previously been fully known. Thus Christ Jesus, the Messiah, was and is the Way-shower for mankind, for all time. And it does not in the least detract from the glory, the divine sublimity, of Christ Jesus' mission to say that ideas similar to those he revealed were discerned and demonstrated to a certain extent centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. Continuing on page 333 of Science and Health, our Leader writes, "Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature, the essence of Love."
Even entirely apart from the Biblical record we find instances of those who caught "glorious glimpses" of Truth. For example, in the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras, speaking of causation, said that the first cause was not in matter, but in some external law like that which governs numbers. And following out this same line of thought, Xenophanes affirmed that one God was the cause of the universe. "Xenophanes boldly declared that not many gods but one only was the cause of the universe" (My Book of History, Volume II).
