Editorial March 4, 1939 Issue

"In the way of righteousness"

George Shaw Cook

"IN the way of righteousness is life; and in the pathway thereof there is no death." Righteousness is rightness—right thinking, right acting, right being. One of the synonyms for righteousness is godliness, and as understood in Christian Science God is infinite good. Therefore, to think, do, and be good, is, according to the above-quoted verse from Proverbs, to walk in the pathway of righteousness, in which "there is no death."

In the fifth chapter of Genesis it is said that "Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him," which of course does not mean that Enoch ceased to be. It means that because of his Godlike thinking and acting Enoch reached the point in his experience where he was translated, without passing through what is called death, from a material or mortal sense of existence into the conscious realization of immortal, spiritual being. Writing of this Biblical event, Mary Baker Eddy says, on page 214 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "If Enoch's perception had been confined to the evidence before his material senses, he could never have 'walked with God,' nor been guided into the demonstration of life eternal."

Jesus of Nazareth, through his understanding of God as the only Life, and of man as the eternal likeness of Life, was able to annul so-called mortal or material laws which were supposed to have resulted in his death, and to free himself from the bonds of the tomb in which his body had been placed by Joseph of Arimathaea. The Gospel of Luke states that when the two Marys and the other women came to the sepulcher early in the morning of the third day after the crucifixion, expecting to find their Master in the tomb, they were accosted by two men " in shining garments," who said, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." All students of the Scriptures are familiar with the fact that after the resurrection Christ Jesus remained forty days, going about from place to place, until his ascension—his greatest demonstration of the unreal nature of materiality and mortality. Of the transcendent proof of man's immortality Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 46), "In his final demonstration, called the ascension, which closed the earthly record of Jesus, he rose above the physical knowledge of his disciples, and the material senses saw him no more."

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