Does not every person, whether he is of humble or haughty lineage, desire to reign over the kingdom of his own life experience? However, men often find this desire thwarted by various phases of materialistic belief. They become dominated by disease, sin, limitations, seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Only a few seem to get beyond mortality's mediocrity and reach the consciousness of man's spiritual destiny. Yet an innate sense of man's right to individual, impartial dominion persists. Somewhere, somehow, there must be a reason for this awareness, a cause deeper than human egotism, will, or prerogative of mortal birth. Must not this reason be the status of the source from which the real man emanates, the divinely royal nature of his Father-Mother God, which bestows upon him the title of son of the King?
In this connection there is an illuminating paragraph in the book "No and Yes" by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. An extract from the paragraph reads as follows (p. 36): "The real Christ was unconscious of matter, of sin, disease, and death, and was conscious only of God, of good, of eternal Life, and harmony. Hence the human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and royalty of his being,—holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as real." Jesus was conscious of his spiritual royalty and so reigned over the years of his earthly experience. He also taught his followers to know God as their Father and to recognize and exercise man's inherited power in their own affairs. The winds, the waves, the earth and space, the troubles of the world, the crimes of mortal mind, and the sufferings of the flesh bowed before the majesty of him who knew that man is the son of God and wields the scepter of immortality. He was the ruler over his journey from sense to Soul because he knew it was the authority of omnipotence that worked in him. And he prayed that his disciples might know the divine sonship of man, might be with him at this point of conscious enthronement with God.
The deeply revered Leader of Christian Science, whose spiritual insight was akin to the Master's as the revelation of Truth embraced her in its light, understood man's reflection of the sovereignty of God and has lifted the thoughts of mankind from the helplessness of mortality to the power of man's spiritual dignity in the kingdom of his Father. This may be one of many reasons why she has made it a duty for every member of The Mother Church to pray daily: "'Thy kingdom come;' let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and govern them!" (Manual of The Mother Church, Art. VIII, Sect. 4.) What an individual crowning ceremony this praying time may be, for God answers prayer and invests awakened consciousness with the power of the kingdom of heaven.
