(p. 31)

SIXTEENTH DAY

THE MISSION OF THE CHRIST

            Spirit loq. You still doubt that we are the instruments of Christ. Your mind is still dark as to the nature of Christ’s mission on Earth. He came to open man’s understanding to the glory of God, and to the ends of his own existence. He did not come to establish himself and his sufferings as the object of man’s devotion, but to establish the Light, the Life, the Love, the Power of God which were manifested through him and through all Nature, as the object of man’s aspiration, as the goal of man’s continuous effort.

            “The Light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” says John. Christ’s object was not appreciated in his own age, as his cruel persecution and murder prove, nor has it been understood more than very partially yet. Nearly two thousand years has it taken to wean men from the materialism of their hero worship, and place Christ on the throne of man’s imagination as the Divine Instrument to awaken in man the consciousness of his entire dependence upon God and of the unlooked for results proceeding there from. The intimate connection of man with God, the near fatherhood of God the vastness of the supply of help, physical,

(p. 32)

mental, and moral, afforded by God to man, answering his every need and aspiration – these were urged by Christ as a fulfillment of the earlier theocratic teachings of Moses and the prophets. The kingdom of the Spirit to be entered by man while on earth; the kingdom of Heaven to be attained by man while on Earth; and the immediate abode within man of God, were to supplant the old order of teaching which prevailed when man’s understanding and aspiration were not sufficiently developed to realize the vast conception of himself which must arise out of a further knowledge of God manifested in the universe and within his own consciousness.