Article March 11, 1911 Issue

LIFE SPIRITUALLY DISCERNED

ELINOR F. EDWARDS.

Who can estimate the importance of rightly understanding the words we use, especially the true significance of these two short words, life and death. Paul's definition is metaphysical and correct: "To be spiritually minded is life": "to be carnally minded is death." Life and death are, then, conditions of thought; and to the degree that thought is spiritual—that is, honest, unselfish, loving, and pure—it partakes of life; but if thought is dishonest, selfish, unloving, or impure, it presages death.

The expression is often heard, "I am tired to death." but the time must inevitably come when every one shall say, "I am tired of death;" in other words, "I am tired of my own selfishness, ingratitude, unlovingness, and inertia;" and to cry out with St. Paul, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" When thought has even begun to turn in the direction of Life, and as the desire increases to show more love and consideration for others, the mortal is being put off and the immortal sense put on. Thus does one learn something of what the words life and death really mean.

If to be spiritually minded is life, then the most exuberant sense of physical life is not life, nor is the word death, as applied only to a material body, the correct use of that word, nor can humanity ever be delivered from dying by such a belief. Jesus said, "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." That is, we may well fear or shrink from moral death, deadness to the spiritual qualities of compassion, gratitude, purity, and unselfishness, and strongly resist the subtlety of inertia, destructive criticism, and the selfishness which would benumb or kill one's spiritual sense. Christ Jesus said, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God"—that they might exercise Godlike qualities of thought. To know God is to have the Mind which was in Christ Jesus, and in proportion to the daily activity of right thought, an individual is even now entering into life eternal, which is the only immortality there is or ever can be, since the qualities of thought which express God are free from change and decay.

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