Jesus was a man, a human being, who understood his own nature. He knew that as the human embodies the Divine, it manifests the Christ nature. Jesus never thought of himself as different from others; his whole teaching was that what he did others could do. His divine nature was aroused; he had plunged beneath the material surface of creation and found its spiritual cause. This cause, he called God or the Father. To this indwelling God, he constantly turned for help, daily guidance, and counsel. To Jesus, God was an indwelling Reality, the Infinite Person in every personality. It was by the power of this Spirit that Jesus lived. He clearly understood the unity of God and humanity.

Everyone is a potential Christ. From the least to the greatest, the same life runs through all, threading itself into the patterns of our individuality. Everyone is “over all, in all and through all.” As Jesus the man gave way to the Divine Idea, the human took on the Christ Spirit and became the voice of God to humanity.

Conscious of his divinity, yet humble as he contemplated the infinite life around him, Jesus spoke from the height of spiritual perception, proclaiming the deathless reality of the individual life, the continuity of the individual soul, the unity of the Universal Spirit with all people.

Religious Science, following the example of Jesus, teaches that all people may aspire to divinity, since all are incarnations of God. It also teaches a direct relationship between God and humankind. The indwelling Spirit is God. It could be nothing less, since we have Spirit plus nothing, out of which all things are made. Behind each is the Infinite, within each is the Christ. There is no boundary line between the mind of humankind and the Mind which is God.

Religious Science teaches that human personality should be, and may become, the highest manifestation of God. There is a reservoir of life and power as we approach the center; it is loosed and flows through us to the circumference as we realize the unity of the whole and our relationship to it. God is incarnated in all people and individualized through all creation without loss to Itself.

To be an individual means to exist as an entity. As God, rightly understood, is the Infinite Person, so the Spirit is the Infinite Essence of all individuality. Within the One Supreme Mind, since It is infinite, exists the possibility of projecting limitless expressions of Itself, but since the Infinite is infinite, each expression of Itself is unique and different from any other expression. Thus the Infinite is not divided, but multiplied.

While all people have the same origin, no two are alike except in ultimate essence—“One God and Father of us all,” but numberless sonships, each sonship a unique institution in the universe of wholeness. All people are individualized centers of God-consciousness and spiritual power, as complete as they know themselves to be, and they know themselves only as they comprehend their relationship to the whole.

This Presence, this inner sense of a greater Reality bears witness to Itself through our highest acts and in our deepest emotions. Who is there who has not at times felt this inner Presence? It is impossible to escape our true nature. The voice of Truth is insistent. The urge to unfold is constant. In the long run each of us will fully express our divinity, for “good will come at last alike to all.”

We stand in the shadow of a mighty Presence, while love forever points the way to heaven. Mingled with the voice of humanity is the word of God, for Truth is a synonym for God, and who ever speaks any truth speaks the word of God. Science reveals eternal principles; mathematics, immutable laws, and illumined minds reveal the Eternal Spirit. Behind all is a unity, through all is a diversity, saturating all is a divinity.

We can no more do without religion than we can do without food, shelter, or clothing. According to our belief about God will be our estimate of life here and hereafter. To believe in a God of vengeance is one thing, and to believe in a God of love and a just law of cause and effect is another.

To believe in a special dispensation of Providence robs us of our own immediate accessibility to goodness and creates the necessity of mediums, other than our own souls, through which we must gain entrance to Reality. We can not reach beyond the vision of our own souls. We must have direct access to the Truth.

To believe in a specialized Providence is both scientific and sensible. We are always specializing some law of nature; this is the manner in which all science advances. Unless we can thus specialize the great Law of Life Itself—the Law of Mind and Spirit—we have no possibility of further advancement in the scale of being.

The unique power that Jesus expressed was a result of his conscious union with the creative Principle which is God. Jesus realized that we are living in a spiritual universe now, and like Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Swedenborg, Emerson, and Whitman, he clearly understood and taught a law of parallels or spiritual correspondences. The parables of Jesus were mostly illustrations of the concept that the laws of nature and the laws of thought are identical. This has been one of the highest perceptions of the enlightened of all ages.

The universe in which we live is a spiritual system governed by laws of Mind. There are not two minds, there is but One Mind, which is God. The outpush of the Mind of God through the mind of man is the self-realization of Spirit seeking a new outlet for Its own expression. Ideas come from the Great Mind and operate through the human mind. The two are one. In this way the Infinite Mind is personal to each individual.

From the infinite self-knowingness of God, our power to know arises, because our mind springs from the Universal Mind. In this way the Infinite multiplies Itself through the finite. •

Excerpted from What Religious Science Teaches by Ernest Holmes, published by Science of Mind Publishing.

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