Life the Way

ANNIE M. PAYNE.

The expression, "God took him to himself," is generally used in reference to so-called death, that stage of human experience when mortal mind decides that the semi-religious, semi-material sense which men call a "soul" must part company from its supposed prison-house, the body, and seek another sphere, presumably within material space, wherein it can be "forever with the Lord."

The conclusion that death is real, that is, known to omnipotent God—yea, that it is His method of bringing man into nearer contact with himself—involves thought in many contradictions. In illustration let us look at the dictum accepted by enlightened modern theology, that "Heaven is a state and not a place." Here we have a thought which would land us at once in Christian Science, but for this older belief which maintains that spirit is imprisoned in matter from which it must be freed by death. It is surely obvious that if spirit resides in matter, or "soul" in "body," as it is commonly expressed, then spirit must be fitted for, and be cognizant of, material space relations; hence its heaven is not a state only but also a place, and hence also its consciousness or the atmosphere of its heaven is not a purely spiritual one.

Thanks be to Divine Love, that in this age and through Christian Science it may be known with absolute certainty that God takes us not to Himself through the removal of a fictitious self to another sphere, neither through the loss of any real substance, nor through the disuniting of aught which the Eternal has made one.

In Christian Science we learn that the embodiment of God's child can never decay. It can never pass from one material condition to another, for it is never subject to material conditions. Mortals must rise to see this, and seeing, gradually put away the myriad beliefs of mortality. Through Science the false consciousness called matter, and its self-styled ego, mortal mind, disappears.

But, it may be asked, how then does God take us to himself if not through death? How but through an enlarged and spiritualized sense of Life? Through obedience, patience, humility, purity, spiritual activity, the recognition of God's omnipresence—these are the avenues by which we approach the Divine consciousness and learn that we are not appointed unto death, but that our heavenly Father hath already taken us to himself.

Christian Science comes to every one whom material sense has seemingly so beclouded as to make him despondent of God's grace, telling him that the Father hath already taken him to himself through that broken and contrite heart which He doth not despise. It bids him awake, because it is his right, his heritage, to be forever at rest in God, in knowing that man is "made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life."

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Essentials and Non-essentials

August 11, 1906

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