As the season draws near when Christendom turns with reverence and gratitude to that monumental character, Christ Jesus, it is proper for everyone whose life has been influenced by his teachings to reappraise the value of his work, and to seek more fully to understand his advent and its meaning for the individual and the world.
Sometimes when heavy clouds hide the sun, letting but a dim light shine through, there suddenly comes a parting of the clouds, and the sun's undimmed brilliance emblazons the earth. So when the heavy clouds of material-mindedness had for unnumbered ages hidden Truth's light from men, came the messenger of God who said, "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). Human thought, blinded with the darkness of materiality, was slow to recognize the glorious light of spiritual Truth he proclaimed, but that light has remained through the centuries, unchanged by opposition and indifference, the power and the presence of the true idea of God and man, to be progressively understood and specifically demonstrated. The truths he taught base every step of human progress toward individual and social betterment, toward the abatement of human strife and the establishment of lasting peace, and toward the discovery of the kingdom of God. He lighted the way for you and me from matter's earth to God's heaven. He laid in human consciousness the foundation stones for a new world.
Jesus sought no personal worship; he repudiated it. Personal worship of a great and good man, he well knew, can never be substituted for the demand of the intelligence that is God that "they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" (Jer. 31:34). Jesus' mission was to turn men's thoughts to God, to help men understand God's nature as Spirit, Mind, and Father, and to realize that each individual is, in reality, not a bundle of temporary material cells, linked to an aggregation of material thoughts, but God's son, Mind's idea, the living witness in thought, word, and act of the Life and Love that is God.
