TO view all things from the spiritual standpoint is of vital importance to the Christian Scientist. It is basic to his demonstration. This was clearly understood by Paul, who, after his conversion, recognized that everything should be judged or interpreted from a spiritual standpoint and that Christians must have "the mind . . . which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5). Paul often made this clear, as in the first epistle to the Corinthians, where he wrote (2:12, 13): "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual."
This attitude and outlook imbued the early Christian church with vigor, joy, activity, and zeal. Later, when worldly wisdom and policy crept into the church, its true growth and movement were arrested and its healing mission lost. But these have been reinstated in the present age through the revelation of Christian Science. Once more it has been made clear that Christ Jesus came to show mankind how to find liberation from the illusions of mortal conditions and how to recognize the perfect man of God's creating, the beloved son of the one Father, God.
In speaking of the Saviours mission and of mortal conditions to which he had to conform, Mary Baker Eddy says in part (Unity of Good, pp. 59, 60): "Jesus came to rescue men from these very illusions to which he seemed to conform: from the illusion which calls sin real, and man a sinner, needing a Saviour; the illusion which calls sickness real, and man an invalid, needing a physician; the illusion that death is as real as Life. From such thoughts— mortal inventions, one and all—Christ Jesus came to save men, through ever-present and eternal good."
