Article August 28, 1902 Issue

Heaven

SAMUEL H. GREENWOOD

Heaven has been the hope of mortals through all these weary ages. It has been the Golden Land of their dreams, the goal of longing hearts, the haven from sorrow, suffering, and unrest. But oh, it has always been so far away! a vague somewhere that one must die to reach, with a terrible uncertainty of reaching it. And that horrible sense of the doom that might follow the death of loved ones, with its eternal separation, has lain, a heavy shadow on the hearts of every age. What a parody on God and His dear love, and the Christ who came to redeem us, in whom all shall "be made alive!" Christian Science reveals heaven not as a locality but a condition of consciousness; not as a future state but a present possibility. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within us; and it comprises the right understanding and demonstration of God. It is heaven brought down to man through the understanding of Life, and not man carried up to heaven on the shadow of death. We are in heaven or hell to-day in proportion to our consciousness of good or evil, sin or holiness. The illusion of error—sin, disease, death—must be utterly wiped out from human consciousness by the very nature of Truth's infinitude; and it follows that all that can be punished or lost is the sense of error. The heaven of Christian Science is large enough to include all God's children, and ineffably transcends the highest human thought of it. And when this whole old Gospel of the Christ has been preached to every nation, and its whole Truth demonstrated, then will universal harmony (heaven) be eternally realized.

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