Salvation is as eternal as God.  To mortal thought Jesus appeared as a child, and grew to manhood, to suffer before Pilate and on Calvary, because he could reach and teach mankind only through this conformity to mortal conditions; but Soul never saw the Saviour come and go, because the divine idea is always present.

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.

Mortal man is a kingdom divided against itself.  With the same breath he articulates truth and error.  We say that God is All, and there is none beside Him, and then talk of sin and sinners as real.  We call God omnipotent and omnipresent, and then conjure up, from the dark abyss of nothingness, a powerful presence named evil.  We say that harmony is real, and inharmony is its opposite, and therefore unreal; yet we descant upon sickness, sin, and death as realities.

With the tongue “bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, who are made after the similitude [human concept] of God.  Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing.  My brethren, these things ought not so to be.” (James iii. 9, 10.) Mortals are free moral agents, to choose whom they would serve.  If God, then let them serve Him, and He will be unto them All-in-all.

If God is ever present, He is neither absent from Himself nor from the universe.  Without Him, the universe would disappear, and space, substance, and immortality be lost.  St. Paul says, “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” (1 Corinthians xv. 17.) Christ cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God.  This false sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve.  Rising above the false, to the true evidence of Life, is the resurrection that takes hold of eternal Truth.  Coming and going belong to mortal consciousness.  God is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”

To material sense, Jesus first appeared as a helpless human babe; but to immortal and spiritual vision he was one with the Father, even the eternal idea of God, that was—­and is—­neither young nor old, neither dead nor risen.  The mutations of mortal sense are the evening and the morning of human thought,—­the twilight and dawn of earthly vision, which precedeth the nightless radiance of divine Life.  Human perception, advancing toward the apprehension of its nothingness, halts, retreats, and again goes forward; but the divine Principle and Spirit and spiritual man are unchangeable,—­neither advancing, retreating, nor halting.

Our highest sense of infinite good in this mortal sphere is but the sign and symbol, not the substance of good.  Only faith and a feeble understanding make the earthly acme of human sense.  “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.” (Galatians ii. 20.)