s, all had primitive perceptions of truth,
and all became channels for the passing of the Christ-principle to
mankind in some degree. But none of these men ever illustrated that
principle as did the man Jesus. He is the most marvelous manifestation
of God that has ever appeared among mankind; so true and exact was
the manifestation that he could tell the world that in seeing him
they were actually seeing the Father. It is quite true that many
of his great sayings were not original with him. Great truths have
been voiced, even by so-called pagans, from earliest times. But he
demonstrated and made practical the truth in these sayings. And he
exposed the nothingness of the human mental concept of matter by
healing disease, walking the waves, and in other wonderful ways. It
is true that long before his time Greek philosophers had hit upon the
theory of the nothingness of matter. Plato had said that only ideas
were real. But Jesus--or the one who brought the Christ-message--was
the clearest mentality, the cleanest human window-pane, to quote
Carmen, that ever existed. Through him the divine mind showed with
almost unobscured fullness. God's existence had been discerned and
His goodness proved from time to time by prophets and patriarchs, but
by no means to the extent that Jesus proved it. There were those
before him who had asserted that there was but one reality, and that
human consciousness was not the real self. There were even those who
believed matter to be created by the force of thought, even as in
our own day. _But it remained for Jesus to make those ideas
intensely practical, even to the overcoming and dissolution of his
whole material concept of the universe and man._ And it remained
for him to show that the origin of evil is in the lie about God. It
was his mission to show that the devil was 'a man-killer from the
beginning,' because it is the supposition that there is power apart
from God. It was his life purpose to show mankind that there is
nothing in this lie to cause fear, and that it can be overcome by
overcoming the false thought which produces it. By overcoming that
thought he showed men the evanescent nature of sickness and death.
And sin he showed to be a missing of the mark through lack of
understanding of what constitutes real good.
"Turn now again to the Bible, that fascinating record of a whole
people's search for God and their changing concept of Him. Note that,
wherever in its records evil seems
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