Part 4 (1/2)
Is it unchristian to believe there is no death? Not unless it be a sin to believe that G.o.d is Life and All-in-all. Evil and disease do not testify of Life and G.o.d.
Human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal. The evil accompanying physical personality is illusive and mortal; but the good attendant upon spiritual individuality is immortal. Existing here and now, this unseen individuality is real and eternal. The so-called material senses, and the mortal mind which is misnamed _man_, take no cognizance of spiritual individuality, which manifests immortality, whose Principle is G.o.d.
To G.o.d alone belong the indisputable realities of being. Death is a contradiction of Life, or G.o.d; therefore it is not in accordance with His law, but antagonistic thereto.
Death, then, is error, opposed to Truth,--even the unreality of mortal mind, not the reality of that Mind which is Life. Error has no life, and is virtually without existence. Life is real; and all is real which proceeds from Life and is inseparable from it.
It is unchristian to believe in the transition called _material death_, since matter has no life, and such misbelief must enthrone another power, an imaginary life, above the living and true G.o.d. A material sense of life robs G.o.d, by declaring that not He alone is Life, but that something else also is life,--thus affirming the existence and rulers.h.i.+p of more G.o.ds than one. This idolatrous and false sense of life is all that dies, or appears to die.
The opposite understanding of G.o.d brings to light Life and immortality.
Death has no quality of Life; and no divine fiat commands us to believe in aught which is unlike G.o.d, or to deny that He is Life eternal.
Life as G.o.d, moral and spiritual good, is not seen in the mineral, vegetable, or animal kingdoms. Hence the inevitable conclusion that Life is not in these kingdoms, and that the popular views to this effect are not up to the Christian standard of Life, or equal to the reality of being, whose Principle is G.o.d.
When ”the Word” is ”made flesh” among mortals, the Truth of Life is rendered practical on the body. Eternal Life is partially understood; and sickness, sin, and death yield to holiness, health, and Life,--that is, to G.o.d. The l.u.s.t of the flesh and the pride of physical life must be quenched in the divine essence,--that omnipotent Love which annihilates hate, that Life which knows no death.
”Who hath believed our report?” Who understands these sayings? He to whom the arm of the Lord is revealed. He loves them from whom divine Science removes human weakness by divine strength, and who unveil the Messiah, whose name is Wonderful.
Man has no underived power. That selfhood is false which opposes itself to G.o.d, claims another father, and denies spiritual sons.h.i.+p; but as many as receive the knowledge of G.o.d in Science must reflect, in some degree, the power of Him who gave and giveth man dominion over all the earth.
As soldiers of the cross we must be brave, and let Science declare the immortal status of man, and deny the evidence of the material senses, which testify that man dies.
As the image of G.o.d, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not death. The material senses testify falsely. They presuppose that G.o.d is good and that man is evil, that Deity is deathless, but that man dies, losing the divine likeness.
Science and material sense conflict at all points, from the revolution of the earth to the fall of a sparrow. It is mortality only that dies.
To say that you and I, as mortals, will not enter this dark shadow of material sense, called _death_, is to a.s.sert what we have not proved; but man in Science never dies. Material sense, or the belief of life in matter, must perish, in order to prove man deathless.
As Truth supersedes error, and bears the fruits of Love, this understanding of Truth subordinates the belief in death, and demonstrates Life as imperative in the divine order of being.
Jesus declares that they who believe his sayings will never die; therefore mortals can no more receive everlasting life by believing in death, than they can become perfect by believing in imperfection and living imperfectly.
Life is G.o.d, and G.o.d is good. Hence Life abides in man, if man abides in good, if he lives in G.o.d, who holds Life by a spiritual and not by a material sense of being.
A sense of death is not requisite to a proper or true sense of Life, but beclouds it. Death can never alarm or even appear to him who fully understands Life. The death-penalty comes through our ignorance of Life,--of that which is without beginning and without end,--and is the punishment of this ignorance.
Holding a material sense of Life, and lacking the spiritual sense of it, mortals die, in belief, and regard all things as temporal. A sense material apprehends nothing strictly belonging to the nature and office of Life. It conceives and beholds nothing but mortality, and has but a feeble concept of immortality.
In order to reach the true knowledge and consciousness of Life, we must learn it of good. Of evil we can never learn it, because sin shuts out the real sense of Life, and brings in an unreal sense of suffering and death.
Knowledge of evil, or belief in it, involves a loss of the true sense of good, G.o.d; and to know death, or to believe in it, involves a temporary loss of G.o.d, the infinite and only Life.
Resurrection from the dead (that is, from the belief in death) must come to all sooner or later; and they who have part in this resurrection are they upon whom the second death has no power.
The sweet and sacred sense of the permanence of man's unity with his Maker can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of good, opening wide the portal from death into Life; and when this Life shall appear ”we shall be like Him,” and we shall go to the Father, not through death, but through Life; not through error, but through Truth.
All Life is Spirit, and Spirit can never dwell in its antagonist, matter.
Life, therefore, is deathless, because G.o.d cannot be the opposite of Himself. In Christian Science there is no matter; hence matter neither lives nor dies. To the senses, matter appears to both live and die, and these phenomena appear to go on _ad infinitum_; but such a theory implies perpetual disagreement with Spirit.