Jesus came announcing Truth, and saying not only “the kingdom of God is at hand,” but “the kingdom of God is within you.”  Hence there is no sin, for God’s kingdom is everywhere and supreme, and it follows that the human kingdom is nowhere, and must be unreal.  Jesus taught and demonstrated the infinite as one, and not as two.  He did not teach that there are two deities,—­one infinite and the other finite; for that would be impossible.  He knew God as infinite, and therefore as the All-in-all; and we shall know this truth when we awake in the divine likeness.  Jesus’ true and conscious being never left heaven for earth.  It abode forever above, even while mortals believed it was here.  He once spoke of himself (John iii. 13) as “the Son of man which is in heaven,”—­remarkable words, as wholly opposed to the popular view of Jesus’ nature.

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.  It was this retreat from material to spiritual selfhood which recuperated him for triumph over sin, sickness, and death.  Had he been as conscious of these evils as he was of God, wherein there is no consciousness of human error, Jesus could not have resisted them; nor could he have conquered the malice of his foes, rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and risen from human sense to a higher concept than that in which he appeared at his birth.

Mankind’s concept of Jesus was a babe born in a manger, even while the divine and ideal Christ was the Son of God, spiritual and eternal.  In human conception God’s offspring had to grow, develop; but in Science his divine nature and manhood were forever complete, and dwelt forever in the Father.  Jesus said, “Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.”  Mortal thought gives the eternal God and infinite consciousness the license of a short-lived sinner, to begin and end, to know both evil and good; when evil is temporal and God is eternal,—­and when, as a sphere of Mind, He cannot know beginning or end.

The spiritual interpretation of the vicarious atonement of Jesus, in Christian Science, unfolds the full-orbed glory of that event; but to regard this wonder of glory, this most marvellous demonstration, as a personal and material bloodgiving—­or as a proof that sin is known to the divine Mind, and that what is unlike God demands His continual presence, knowledge, and power, to meet and master it—­would make the atonement to be less than the at-one-ment, whereby the work of Jesus would lose its efficacy and lack the “signs following.”