Toward the close of his task of revealing and demonstrating the truth of being, by overcoming for himself and others the claims of the flesh, Christ Jesus gave to his followers the command, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." He had proved spiritual power to be superior to the claims of mortal mind, in its various evidences of sin and disease and in its medical, religious, and political systems. He did his work for himself and others by knowing the Father and the son, divine Mind and its idea, man. He made no attempt to enter into human organizations for the purpose of healing the maladies of the world. He used no influence to overthrow the Roman government or to restore the Jewish kingdom. With ease he paid the tribute money, and directed men's thoughts to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of spiritual thinking, wherein is realized the government of God, maintaining the unbroken harmony of real being. He was brought by his enemies before the Roman procurator, in the judgment hall, where through his meekness he justified the divinity which he declared and lived. In the face of these things he knew the truth, leaving human modes to their own eventual dissolution before the allness of divine Mind.
Christ Jesus made it clear that in their destined work of saving the world, proving the reality and supremacy of good, his followers could be victorious over the resistance of materiality only as they followed him in the way he taught; and the import of his teaching indicates no other possible way of salvation for the individual or for the world. He declared to his disciples on what basis he founded his church, against which no evil should prevail. And through the centuries immediately succeeding his ministry, so long as the early church adhered to the pure spirituality of his teachings and manifested its power, it had its influence on the lives of increasing numbers of individuals, and thus on general affairs. When, little by little, it received into itself the darkening influence of materiality, that is, when it became absorbed in material ways and means, temporarily it lost its God-bestowed power, and the world lost this saving influence, the spiritual influence bestowed upon Christianity to be wielded for the world through regenerating individual lives.
Nevertheless, despite the mental state of humanity in these dark centuries, the leaven of Truth was never wholly lost from the world. Always there remained the remnant, the few here and there who, remembering that the truth had been revealed through Christ Jesus, sought and found its light; and the historical periods of Christian revival, enlightenment, and advancement variously attested the presence of the leavening truth, the influence of the Christ. "Ages pass," writes Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 118), "but this leaven of Truth is ever at work." No one, then, need despair of his own healing or of the eventual healing of the world, for the leaven of Truth, as it is declared in the same passage, "must destroy the entire mass of error, and so be eternally glorified in man's spiritual freedom."
