Article September 8, 1917 Issue

Life Eternal

J. ALLEN BARRIS

It has ever been the hope of mankind to escape from the beliefs of the flesh and their attendant evils and disappointments. Mortal man, believing or hoping that the present material existence will have an end, and longing for a surcease from his trials and disappointments, looks forward to the time when he will enter upon what he is pleased to call eternal life, forgetting that whatever is eternal is without beginning and without end. He does not stop to consider that from the very nature of eternality, if we are to have eternal life at any time we must have it all the time, even at the present moment. Existence to be eternal at any particular time must be eternal at all times. There is no period at which we can begin such a state; it always has been. This being the case, one is just as near eternal life at the present time as he ever will be. It is ignorance which hides this fact from him, and the great task of mankind is to acquire the truth which will dispel this ignorance.

The Adam or fallen man came into existence, according to the allegory in Genesis, as the result of eating "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," for the sentence was, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." It is therefore this knowledge of good and evil, this belief of life and intelligence in matter, which constitutes the state of death in which the Adam-man still dwells. This state must have had its inception at the moment of disobedience, for does not the warning say "in the day" that they should eat (not at some time thereafter) was the punishment to follow the act, so that this state of belief in death was coincident with the act of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, and is recognized as mortal or material existence,—a state which is dead to the consciousness of Life as the only reality. It is the working out from this mortal sense of existence which constitutes the resurrection.

That which makes life eternal is the spiritual fact that God is man's Life. As God is the only permanent Being there is, it follows that everything which is eternal must be included in Him. "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all," declares the "scientific statement of being" as given on page 468 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy. The Master said, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." If the knowledge of God, who is Spirit, is life eternal, then the belief that we can know matter, the opposite of Spirit or God, must be the opposite of eternal life. The more thoroughly our thought is fixed on matter and the more thoroughly we believe in the reality and power of matter. in that proportion are we separating ourselves from God, from life eternal.

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