Christ Jesus said, "I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me" (John 8:42). In boyhood Jesus acknowledged God as his Father. Later, during his ministry, he acknowledged true relationships and declared the universality of God's parenthood when he answered his own questions, "Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?" (Matt. 12:48) with the words, "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." However, while Jesus stood for and explained man's divine parentage, in childhood he apparently gave willing obedience to his human parents, and on the cross he commended his mother to the tender care of his beloved disciple John, who, it is recorded (John 19:27), "took her unto his own home."
Such obedience and gentle consideration bore out his words and works, which evidenced the fact that God's son, the perfect man of Love's creating, is the only man known to God, and the only man who in reality exists. This true man is made in the likeness of God—Spirit, Principle, Soul, Mind—and must of necessity express the health and holiness of his Father-Mother God, whose purity and goodness he inherits and reflects.
In recognition of man's divine origin, Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 81), "Man in the likeness of God as revealed in Science cannot help being immortal." Christ Jesus proved the truth of this statement long before it was given to this age as a result of Mrs. Eddy's prolonged and consecrated study of the Bible. And so it was when the Christ-idea, which Jesus exemplified, again appeared through Science to human consciousness as the reality of man's being, that belief in the dominant power of material parentage and heritage again lessened.
