Christmas hymns echo the joy in human hearts that God's love has reached mankind and that a Saviour has come to redeem the world from mortality. But to the Christian Scientist Christmas means more than the celebration of the coming of the infant Jesus. It means the joyful demonstration of the incorporeal Christ, the ever-present spiritual man, which every individual must prove to be his real selfhood. So the Scientist sings with deepening insight the loved words of Isaac Watts,
Joy to the world, the Lord is come,
Let earth receive her King.
The joy that accompanies the understanding that man is not a mortal, but the immortal spiritual son of God, can never be lost, for it evidences the very presence of the real man, who is constituted of joy. Mary Baker Eddy describes this man many times in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," but perhaps never with more originality than on page 76, where she writes, "The sinless joy,— the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness without a single bodily pleasure or pain,—constitutes the only veritable, indestructible man, whose being is spiritual."
