Article November 18, 1916 Issue

Man's Life Secure

SAMUEL GREENWOOD

The transient nature of human existence shows that the real life of man to be immortal must be different from anything within the cognizance of physical sense, and that man himself must be different from what is physically apparent. It would follow also from this that to find the truth about man we must look away from matter entirely. This conclusion is obvious from the Scriptural statement that man was made in the image of God, for the divine image cannot rightly be thought of as identical with a sinning and dying mortal. Accepting the inspired Scripture, Mrs. Eddy writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 164), "Man lives, moves, and has his being in God, Love. Then man must live, he cannot die." Jesus gave absolute proof that this deduction is literally true; hence human salvation can be worked out on no other basis.

All human theories agree in teaching that so-called human life is exposed to perpetual danger, and at best has but temporary means of protection. We are taught that death dogs every person's footsteps from the hour of his birth, waiting for the fateful moment which shall yield up its prey. The specter of mortality has thus come to be exalted in human consciousness, overshadowing in belief all earthly activities and despoiling human intercourse of its chiefest joy. And all this without protest in a Christian land, as if there were actually no God in all the universe to preserve and to protect His own creatures!

When Jesus said, "Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life," he was not talking to dead men, but to those who believed they were materially alive. He clearly intended to imply that material sense does not express man's real being, therefore that what is seen as material man does not in the truest sense live at all. When Jesus brought his friend Lazarus unharmed from the grave, and when later he overcame the belief of death for himself, he disproved the existence of any life or law apart from God. He demonstrated the absolute lifelessness, alias the nothingness, of all that does not proceed from or express God; hence that nothing can be interposed between man and his divine source or Principle.

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