Editorial February 21, 1925 Issue

Life Continuous

Albert F. Gilmore

CHRIST JESUS taught and proved that Life is continuous, and Christian Science has elucidated and emphasized this great fact. Anticipation of the termination of existence in death, thought to be inevitable, has been the source of mankind's greatest fear, and the understanding that this experience is neither necessary nor real has lifted the sense of fear immeasurably. Jesus' familiar words, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," find their perfect correlative in Mrs. Eddy's statement in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 485), "Not death, but the understanding of Life, makes man immortal." Wonderful words! Immortality, then, is something to be gained by mankind through understanding—what? The truth about God and man. How blessed are we that through the priceless revelation of our Leader we are enabled to begin at once the demonstration of this Life which knows no death, since Life is timeless Being!

Sometimes, it appears, one who is laboring under a deep sense of inharmony and physical discomfort may feel that he could better work out his problem "on the other side;" that is to say, after having passed through the experience termed death. Such reasoning is fallacious. Can good come of evil? Can submission to the claims of error by any possibility bring about harmony? If so, what becomes of the Master's teachings,—the impossibility of gathering grapes from thorns and figs from thistles, of the same fountain sending forth sweet waters and bitter? We are definitely assured in Christian Science that there is but one source of good,—the infinite God,—whence issues all that is true, beautiful, and lasting. Therefore, we may not justifiably expect to gain even a modicum of good from submission to the seeming power of evil. And the belief in death is an error to be overcome, not submitted to. What of Enoch and Moses, of Elijah and Elisha? Did they undergo this belief; or was their translation of a kind that removed the belief in the necessity of death as a way out of the flesh, of escape from its seeming bondage?

Students of Christian Science learn that progress is made only as understanding grows; that is, only as spiritual truth replaces the false, the sense of error. As truth occupies consciousness, the beliefs termed sin, however real they may have seemed, are discarded, and our mental areas reflect true consciousness, the revelations of divine Mind. The real man, God's expression, knows only eternal Life. Since man expresses only the qualities of God, death has no place in man's consciousness; and we may be assured that mankind will abandon the false sense of life as fast as the truth about Life is gained.

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