Once when Jesus was instructing the people, he urged them to labor not for the meat which would perish, but for that meat which endures even to everlasting life. His hearers showed interest, but before they would fully believe, they demanded a sign or proof. They said that their fathers had eaten manna in the desert, but, their attitude implied, what could this new teacher, Jesus, do? The Master replied: "Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world." And the account continues: "Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst" (John 6:32-35). The Christ is the true bread that feeds the world with God's sustaining law of Life. Mankind is hungering not alone for food and drink, but for a better life, for health, harmony, progress, and happiness. Our heavenly Father is constantly feeding His creation with the nourishment of Love and the vigor of boundless Life.
What can be more encouraging to mankind than to realize that there is a divine law constantly operating to bless and that this law supplies each one with the richest essentials of Life—God's spiritual ideas. Christian Science enables us to see that God's sons include, as His reflection, substance, harmony, goodness, health, freedom, intelligence, and eternal bliss. And these elements are indispensable to the uninterrupted perfection of God's universe, including individual spiritual man. Love's essential qualities and ideas are freely bestowed for the support, progress, and spiritual welfare of man's being.
In God's universe of infinite good, one idea does not receive more of the Father's bestowals than another. Each one shares equally in the unfoldment of Love's endless bounty, in the expression of Life's immortal activity and completeness. God is forever feeding man, His image and likeness, with the spiritual nutriment of Mind, the ideas of perfection, which impart strength, beauty, usefulness, wisdom, and joy. This divine activity, this perpetual feeding of man with the infinite substance and ideas of Mind, goes on from everlasting to everlasting, and its immeasurable beneficence is available to each one of us at this moment in the degree that we drop the limitations of material sense, claim our spiritual heritage as children of God, and awake to the truth of being.
