kingdom of God.” The “Son of man” means the progeny of man, i.e., the body which is born out of another human body. It may seem to us that “Son of man” means something other than this—that it means Christ. Granting this, we are then to interpret the next saying of Christ, “The Son of man shall be delivered unto the Gentiles and He shall be crucified,” as meaning that Christ, the Eternal Spirit, was to be crucified by material nails and His Spirit destroyed, an explanation which is obviously absurd; for it was the material body only, in which the Spirit of Christ was clothed, that could possibly be crucified, not the Spirit. We can explain the first quoted saying of Christ in this way: unless we can transcend the body and realize ourselves as spirit, we cannot enter into the kingdom or state of that Universal Spirit. We find an echo of this in a Sanskrit couplet of the Oriental scriptures: “If thou canst transcend the body and perceive thyself as spirit,
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THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
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