Editorial August 21, 1920 Issue

All Good Is Immortal

Gustavus S. Paine

To know divine Principle and its expression is real and permanent happiness. The real man, living entirely as idea or activity expressing infinite Mind, ever rejoices in this understanding. What constitutes the goodness of his living, whether it be called satisfaction or enthusiasm or by any other name, comes eternally from the one source. His immortal joy consists in his inseparability from the one creative and all-sufficing Spirit, which is God. There is no other genuine relationship or association than that of the real man to God. Forever the true man has been and is associating wholly with divine intelligence, not with persons. The understanding of this is necessarily enthusiastic, though calm and sure. All there is to good is thus omnipresent, for the one intelligent Principle is always here, manifesting itself with inexhaustible vigor. This is the truth of immortality.

On page 42 of "Miscellaneous Writings," at the end of a clear answer to an important question, Mrs. Eddy says: "The difference between a belief of material existence and the spiritual fact of Life is, that the former is a dream and unreal, while the latter is real and eternal. Only as we understand God, and learn that good, not evil, lives and is immortal, that immortality exists only in spiritual perfection, shall we drop our false sense of Life in sin or sense material, and recognize a better state of existence." Thus it is for each one to know and to prove his immortality here and now as the expression of the one infinitely spiritual Life, and to rejoice that this Life is always manifest as Immanuel, or "God with us." The demonstration of this involves, of course the demonstration of the immortality of all that ever has been real. When one reasons carefully as to what one has had of good, what one has truly loved, one sees that divine intelligence manifest is all that ever has been present to inspire and satisfy in every way. By turning thus wholly to the truth one finds in the loving divine Mind the present tangible reality of all that ever has existed. Unlimited existence as idea expressing infinite Principle is alone spiritually and tangibly adequate.

This actual understanding of immortality is obviously altogether different from any suppositions of materialism. In Article VIII, Section 3, of the Manual of The Mother Church, Mrs. Eddy admonishes us: "When it is necessary to show the great gulf between Christian Science and theosophy, hypnotism, or spiritualism, do it, but without hard words." The difference is that Christian Science reveals one infinite Soul or divine consciousness, of which the immortal man is the expression. In other words, there are not many souls, and the one real Soul, God, always has existed quite apart from the belief in matter. The healing comfort of Christian Science lies in the inseparability of the true man from all that ever has been real, which is simply divine intelligence manifest, and not human persons at all. The immortality that satisfies is the immortality of Mind and idea. Any sense of mortality or human personality is but counterfeit of the reality. Certainly, therefore, no one should even wish to perpetuate a counterfeit. What is desirable is to turn entirely away from the spurious, with all its makeshifts, to the true idea of the true Mind.

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