IN order to demonstrate Christian Science we must be able to perceive the truths it reveals of God and His relation to man. It is easy to think of God as Spirit because we know Him only as incorporeal, but, because the concept of man as corporeal has been accepted as reality for so many years, we find it difficult to think of man as wholly spiritual, God's likeness. When we identify ourselves as mortals, having an existence separate from Spirit, God, we are not able to comprehend anything of our true selfhood. Materiality can have no consciousness of spirituality.
Christ Jesus came to destroy the belief in material existence and proved that there is only one creation, the spiritual. He never lost sight of his own identity as the reflection of Spirit and thus was able to tell us of our spiritual identity. Had he believed in a material creation as real, as did many who came before him, he would have been unable to tell us of God and of man's relationship to Him. In this age Mary Baker Eddy discovered Christian Science, which substantiates the teachings of Jesus by demonstrating spiritual truths in human experience.
Writing of John's vision on Patmos, Mrs. Eddy says in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 561), "John saw the human and divine coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and its demonstration,—reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which is God." It is apparent that John saw man and the universe not as material, but as spiritual. His experience shows that we need not wait until some future time to behold the spiritual creation. While John still appeared to be on this plane of existence, his consciousness was lifted so high above the material sense of life that he was able, through spiritual sense, to perceive reality; and this was the coincidence of the human and divine.
