Editorial April 5, 1947 Issue

Life's Eternal Abundance

Paul Stark Seeley

The material sense of life is a variable quantity. Some insects, for instance, live but a few hours; some creatures, such as the tortoise, the eagle, and the elephant, live a century or longer. Certain trees live for several thousand years. But what is a century or a score of centuries compared with eternity? It is less than a grain of sand in all the sand on the earth. No amount of time can acquaint us with timeless being. Only deific Mind, God, can reveal to us the meaning of eternity.

Referring to spiritual Life, the opposite of time-measured material being, Mary Baker Eddy writes, "Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 468). Can you and I truthfully say that eternity expresses our thought of Life? Yet only in the measure that we realize this verity do we understand what Life really is, beginningless and endless Mind perpetually expressed by man.

Some cynics and philosophers have often expressed repugnance to the thought of eternal life. If eternal life were just a continuing of the material order, heavy-laden with material selfhood, not many would desire it. While there is a general aversion to dying, the thought of living eternally poses the question as to how man can be satisfactorily employed forever and ever. For this question eternal Mind has a complete answer. Mind's nature being eternal, the nature of its representative, man, must necessarily be eternal. The inexhaustible originality, freshness, and newness of the great Parent, Mind, forever evidenced in the unfolding of its limitless store of thoughts and ideas in the consciousness of man, affords to spiritualized consciousness a satisfying answer as to the nature of Life's unending continuity. Man can no more tire of being than Deity can become weary of existing.

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