Article August 31, 1918 Issue

The Last Enemy

HUGH A. STUDDERT KENNEDY

No one thing, perhaps, has stood between mortal man and his happiness and peace more effectively than his belief in and apprehension of death. The urgent need of the hour, possibly more urgent than ever before, is to gain some just sense of this matter; to learn something of the fact, which Jesus proved, that death may be overcome here and now; that it may be seen for what it is,—just as certainly an illusion as the meeting of the sea and sky on the distant horizon. Christ Jesus, as St. Paul said, has "abolished death" (let the words be noted), and has drawn aside the veil, bringing "life and immortality to light."

Now, no one ever came to the horizon, using the word in the sense of the meeting point of sea and sky, and no one ever crossed it. It is utterly an illusion. The voyager who seems to be sailing toward it never finds it. It is always before him and beyond him. To the people on shore, it is true, the ship he is on seems to be disappearing over the horizon, but those on board are conscious of no change, and the horizon is ever before them, until at last they realize that it has no real existence. To the mariner at sea the horizon is not a thing, or a place, or a destination, and he knows that for him the crossing of it can never be an experience. It only marks the limits of his vision, and he knows that if he could view the world from the immensity of space the horizon would be no more. The people on the shore lose sight of the people on the ship, but these people go on in good company with those who are on the ship with them, and if they go to a foreign country they meet friends and make friends of those who are there. There is no passing of the horizon, and, after the same fashion, there is no passing through death. Did not our Master say: "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death"?

And yet for untold ages the world has bound itself by this belief, and freedom can alone come by attaining a truer, fuller sense of life; that is, by recognizing the great fact that just as the statement "twice two is four" knows no bounds and is affected by no change, so what we know of Truth, what we know of God, is here and now, not shall be, eternal life; and that as we live more and more in the consciousness of this life, so our likeness to the eternal will gradually grow to be such that only to the watcher on the shore of time will it appear that we cross the horizon. We shall have more and more to bring on into eternity, and less and less to leave behind, until, just as John did, we see a new heaven and a new earth, without having to cross the boundary line called death. Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 598): "One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown."

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