Editorial November 27, 1915 Issue

Consenting unto Death

John B. Willis

In his splendidly daring self-defense before Festus, Felix, and Agrippa, St. Paul relates the story of the supreme event of his life, and in evidence of the wondrous transformation which it effected he cites the bitterness of his past bigotry as manifest in the fact that when the saintly Stephen was stoned, he was "standing by, and consenting unto his death." This consent of the apostle to the rightfulness of death is explicable only when we remember the depth of his educated ignorance, and to one instructed in Christian Science the present practically universal affirmation of its naturalness and inescapability is seen to be due to the same fact. True, all men struggle to postpone the date of their demise, but today very few even of the followers of him who said, "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," have any least thought that death can ever be escaped from.

Christian Scientists have come to understand the unreality of sin, and since this involves the unreality of every sequence of sin, it is quite as illogical for them to consent to the normality of death as it would be for them to consent to the normality of sickness. The thought that life has an end is now seen to be a child of the belief that it is the product of material organization, which belief is forever put away in the idealism of Christian Science, so that consent to death becomes equally unphilosophical and unchristian. Nevertheless, how often have we found ourselves succumbing to this down-hill drift of thought and expectation, yielding to the world's insistence that death must come; and how constantly we need to remember Christ Jesus' words, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

In truth there is, there can be, no death, and no thought of it in Life, for these are contrary; and this right sense of life, our devotion to the concept of it revealed in Christian Science, determines our spiritual status and efficiency. No man is truly alive who consents in any way or degree to death. Respecting this, Mrs. Eddy inquires in Science and Health (p. 216): "Who shall say that man is alive today, but may be dead tomorrow? What has touched Life, God, to such strange issues?" He alone who links himself to Life in persistent thought of Life's immediate presence and eternality, has assumed the Christianly becoming and the healing attitude toward death.

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