for His object was to rid the world of superstition. His words were called out in answer to some question asked by the rulers of the people, and His answer was in accordance with the question, but in it was shown the absurdity of the belief; so they could not catch Him.
The greatest evil to overcome was the resurrection of the dead. This was a difficult question to solve, for Jesus never believed in the natural body rising and to deny the resurrection of man was as absurd as to deny the resurrection of the body, so to deny one and prove the other was to admit a resurrection and teach it. But as the people called sin “death” and truth “life,” it was easy to adopt these meanings. He could then show that the resurrection from the dead was a resurrection from an error to a truth. But this must be explained by a parable. Here is what Jesus intended to convey: that this power that the people could not account for and which they ascribed to evil spirits or the dead was a Science of ourselves, which embraces all we are and our senses. It is life itself, and a knowledge of it is to put it into practice so the world can be benefited. Ignorance of it embraces all phenomena. This makes man superstitious, for he is ignorant of himself, man thinks his belief is all there is of him, and so it is till he is brought into a higher state which shows that he has two minds. One mind embraces matter and is in it. The other is Science and is out of matter, and uses matter as a medium to convince the natural man of a higher knowledge of himself. It was Jesus' mission to convince the natural man of this truth; so when He spoke of Jesus He spoke of the earthly man, but when He spoke of Christ He spoke of the heavenly man or Science. This the people could not understand, so when He said He should rise from the earthly man, (Jesus) He spoke of this Christ, and the people had no idea what He meant to convey to them. So when they saw Him taken and tried they all forsook Him and stood afar off and some denied Him. This showed that they expected that Jesus would be crucified. This embraced Jesus Christ and all of His preaching and when He was crucified that ended the life of Jesus Christ to them.
Now, to rise from the dead was what He had promised His followers and they believed that Jesus intended to prove that His body, or Jesus, which was flesh and blood, should rise. Here was where they misunderstood Him. Jesus never intended to convey any such idea. If the people had under-
