Editorial May 15, 1909 Issue

"THE LAST ENEMY."

John B. Willis

There has ever been a feeling, no less universal than instinctive, that being is life, and the normality as well as the ideality of death has been denied in every impulse and assertion of that desire for immortality, the defeat of death, which has moved men from the beginning. It has thus come about that while the teaching of Christian Science, that "all is Life, and there is no death" (Science and Health, p. 331), may have provoked the smile of amused incredulity or the sneer of pious prejudice, it has voiced the deepest instinct and longing of the human heart, and the acceptance of this teaching is compelled, in the instance of every intelligent person who believes in God, the moment he realizes the utter incongruity of the association of death with the manifestations of infinite Life. Being absolute opposites and contradictions, Life and death can no more exist together than can light and darkness, and since Life, God, is infinite, "in whom all things consist," death has no existence at all, even as twice two is five has no existence.

To believe that infinite Spirit is the source of all existence is to see that all breakdown and disintegration are necessarily but the phenomena of a false sense of being, hence to say "there is no death" is simply to stand for the integrity of God's universe; it is to honor the spiritual and ignore the claims of its opposite; it is to endorse the logical outcome of that divine idealism which is dominating philosophic thought; in a word, it is to be severely sensible. From this idealistic point of view it is no more startling to think of overcoming death, the outcome of false belief, than it is to think of doing away with false belief itself.

Christian Science knows no death save that of error, and this means life because it is the conscious escape from bondage to sin and sickness. Speaking in his paradoxical way, St. Paul said, "I die daily." He might have said, "I am realizing each hour the ever-enlarging freedom which Truth brings from the enslavement of material sense." This is to "die" to sin, in fulfilment of Ezekiel's declaration and prophecy, "The soul [sense] that sinneth, it shall die" Says our Leader, "Mortals claim that death is inevitable; but man's eternal Principle is ever-present Life." "We can, and ultimately shall, so rise as to avail ourselves in every direction of the supremacy of Truth over error, Life over death" (Science and Health, pp. 312, 406). The supreme problem of humanity thus becomes distributed. We escape from a doomful and foreboding generalization, and lay hold upon a concrete proposition which we may begin to solve today. Instead of accepting the necessity of the unequal struggle of the valley of shadows, the rightly instructed Christian man is knowingly overcoming death in every realization of Truth, every spiritual choice, every demonstration over sin and the sickness which attends it.

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