Article July 13, 1929 Issue

Life

EDITH MARY BARLOW

What is Life? All through the ages mankind has been asking this question. Some have inquired in the spirit of Pilate when he asked Christ Jesus, "What is truth?" yet without any genuine desire for an answer. Others have asked this question so earnestly and persistently that they have touched the hem of Truth's garment. In the march of civilization, as free thought became more clearly recognized as the right of all, even with regard to religious subjects, this question, What is Life, or Being? has come to mean also, What is God? For thinkers have seen that the Giver of life and His gift must fit, and that so-called life in matter, with its sin, oppression, poverty, and pain, could not be the gift of divine Love. Eventually, when the world was ready to understand the answer to its insistent question, Mary Baker Eddy, whose purity and spirituality enabled her to grasp the spiritual truth contained in the Scriptures and hitherto obscured by the materiality of mankind, gave to the world in Christian Science the God-inspired answer to this question. This Science reveals that real Life is eternal, because it is God, Spirit, always and only good. Consequently sin, sickness, and death are unknown to God, Life.

In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes (pp. 324, 325): "Jesus said substantially, 'He that believeth in me shall not see death.' That is, he who perceives the true idea of Life loses his belief in death. He who has the true idea of good loses all sense of evil, and by reason of this is being ushered into the undying realities of Spirit. Such a one abideth in Life,—life obtained not of the body incapable of supporting life, but of Truth, unfolding its own immortal idea. Jesus gave the true idea of being, which results in infinite blessings to mortals."

As soon as we begin to understand the great truth "that Life is God, good, and that evil has in reality neither place nor power in the human or the divine economy" (ibid., p. 327), it is found that divine Love presents to each earnest student the opportunity and the necessity of proving this truth in his own living. Thus, the reflection of God's goodness touches human experience, chasing away the false beliefs of mortals manifested as so-called life in matter. God is too pure to behold these wrong, mortal thoughts: they are unreal, because God did not make them; consequently they must return to their native nothingness, when exposed to the light of Truth revealed in Christian Science.

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