Article May 27, 1911 Issue

OUR RESURRECTION

LOUISE DELISLE RADZINSKI

The ingenuity of mortal mind in finding causes of fear wherewith to torment mankind is nowhere more evident than in the common beliefs concerning the resurrection of the dead. That Christians should base their beliefs upon the teachings of Jesus the Christ would seem the only rational and loyal exercise of their faith; but the sinuosities of error have led mortal man from the positive and pure teachings of the Christ, Truth, into the consuming terrors caused by the misunderstanding of grandly poetic passages of the Apocalypase which have been accepted as expressing judgment and condemnation of man; whereas Christian Science shows these penalties as directed to the erroneous beliefs of mortal mind, through which mankind has been led from one state of suffering to another.

Thus for centuries human beings have been turned from the promises and declarations of Christ Jesus to shudder in fear and despair at the picture of the resurrection and final judgment as presented in Revelation xx. 11-15. This conjunction of the resurrection and the judgment is the root of the fear which has darkened the lives and destroyed the joy of life of so many who sought in fear and trembling to work out their salvation. The annals of religious history are full of the names of saintly men and women who wore out lives of penance and suffering, seeking some way of escape from the dread judgment for which they should rise from their graves. That these fears are chimerical, that they are absolutely without foundation in truth, the words of Christ Jesus clearly prove: "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

And that they who believe in him shall be one with him in the resurrection is plainly told in John xvii., where he says, "And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that may be made perfect in one;" and Paul, to whom such dazzling spiritual illumination had been granted that his material sense of being had never recovered its former erroneous belief of perfection, understood the resurrection and judgment aright when he declared that "there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." After nearly two thousand years, during which these words have rung like trumpet-calls to arouse bewildered and benumbed mankind to make an effort to reach the plane of understanding that will enable them to grasp the regenerating power of these declarations of Truth, God sent His servant, our beloved Leader, to make plain to the dulled mentality of the age the message of divine Love that the spiritually hungry had yearned for so long.

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