In speaking of Christ Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy has written on page 95 of the Christian Science textbook, "The effect of his Mind was always to heal and to save." It was because he expressed and invariably identified himself with the one Mind, that Jesus was in fact the Saviour of the world. He himself summed up his mission in these few words: "For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost." Jesus found a world in need of recovery and salvation because it believed in a mind separate from God, a mind which could be sick and sinful, limited and afraid; a mind which was forced to exercise or submit to influences promising at best merely a temporary deliverance or immunity from mortality's ills.
He whose mission it was to bring salvation did not suggest any temporary or halfway method to the people. He came proclaiming the Christ. He brought the fulfillment of prophecy; deliverance to the captive; sight to the blind; the opening of prison doors; the declaration of the acceptable year. He spoke of overcoming and of glory; of the maximum of power; he assured them of a kingdom where they were not to be subject, but ruler. And he did this because he knew that he was but restoring to them what actually was and had always been theirs. The earlier prophets had exhorted and instructed the people that that which had been lost would be found. But Jesus said and did more than this. He came bringing the remedy for every ill; and, further, he showed them how they too might avail themselves of it. He manifested it to them in example and precept, and he left it with them. Because it was his, it was also theirs.
"Salvation is as eternal as God," writes our Leader on page 59 of "Unity of Good." And she continues a little farther on in the same paragraph, "Soul never saw the Saviour come and go, because the divine idea is always present." It was this ever-present Saviour which brought sudden and, to human sense, miraculous deliverance from suffering to Mrs. Eddy; and gradually it revealed to her the eternal reason for salvation, the spiritual fact of the oneness of Mind and its idea, man.
