Article June 8, 1918 Issue

In nothing that it has ever undertaken to investigate or...

The Christian Science Monitor

In nothing that it has ever undertaken to investigate or to analyze has the human mind proved more self-contradictory or more at sea than in its efforts to define life. The reason for this is perfectly simple and equally obvious. Whether reasoning from a biological, a theological, a philosophical, or what it would term a purely common sense basis, it has always founded its argument on the evidence of the physical senses, so that the conclusion reached has always been a purely finite one. The biologist, that is to say, traces human existence from the germ to its disintegration and reabsorption into matter. The theologian accepts the premises and conclusions of the biologist, with the reservation that he attributes the spark of life not to matter, electricity, or energy, but to God. The philosopher, elaborating his theory of the indestructibility of matter, accepts always the limitations of the physical universe. Whilst the exponent of common sense intrenches himself behind the irrefutable proposition that he believes what he sees.

The curious part of the matter, however, is that the solution of the entire problem is contained, in the very simplest language, in the most available book in the whole world. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that Life is only a synonym for God, and that, this being so, the more a man knows about God, the more he necessarily knows about Life. Now natural science, theology, human philosophy, material common sense, being themselves products of a finite sense of things, have always separated human existence from a larger realization of life. Their exponents have adopted, that is to say, the saying of the philosopher, Seneca, "Quid est enim novi, hominem mori, cujus tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est?" or in direct English, "What is there new, then, for a man in death, seeing that his entire life is a journey to the grave?" To them life is nothing but the form, the divine energy, the matter, or whatever it may be, of their respective schools, and is dependent on or independent of divine propulsion, according to the teaching of these schools.

Now the deduction from this is extremely simple, it either thrusts God entirely out of creation, and enthrones matter in His place, or it makes matter the creation of Spirit, which is entirely absurd. What Jesus himself thought of such teaching he made abundantly and luminously clear. "That," he declared to Nicodemus, "which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit;" whilst to the Jews he insisted, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,"—sayings which, whatever else they may mean, mean unquestionably this: first, that God having in the spiritual creation seen all that He had made, and pronounced it good, cannot possibly subsequently have created the flesh which profiteth nothing; and, second, that life is not a material organism but a conscious understanding of Principle.

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In nothing that it has ever undertaken to investigate or...

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