Editorial December 7, 1918 Issue

Life and Death

Annie M. Knott

We are not surprised in these days when we hear that some one who was reported dead is alive, and we can easily guess the well-nigh overwhelming joy of those most concerned individually in such cases. It is not, however, so easy for most of us to accept the great fact of life when the evidence of its opposite is pressed upon us by physical sense. Although Christian faith claims to rest upon Jesus' teachings, few are ready to see and maintain respecting a dear one who seems to have passed on that he lives; yet this was what the Master said when all around him insisted that Jairus' daughter was dead. Scorn and incredulity were expressed when he made the declaration of life, and sad to say, a similar mental condition would be manifested in like conditions by many to-day who call themselves Jesus' followers. When some of the Sadducees contended for death as inevitable, Christ Jesus insisted upon the spiritual fact, namely, life as known to God. He said that God "is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him."

From the Christian Science standpoint no one is ever dead. Life is the great fact upon which all the deductions must be based and all right conclusions reached, no matter how this may be opposed by material sense. Death cannot bear witness to itself as a fact or factor in the government of the universe, but life declares itself as an eternal fact, however imperfectly discerned by those who accept as final the evidence of material sense. For long ages the human race accepted such evidence with respect to astronomy and refused to believe that this earth was a sphere. Nevertheless it was forced at length to yield up its age-long convictions on these points, as it will be on the far more vital question of life itself.

Accompanying the human belief in death is the belief in a sense of sorrow so deep that it almost shuts out the sense of life from those who yield to it. At such times, to those who accept the physical evidence, not only has life ceased to be for the one who is said to have passed on, but for those who have, as they believe, lost a loved one life is no longer life in its truest sense. In his great poem, "In Memoriam," Tennyson says of death,—

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December 7, 1918
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