Editorial March 28, 1953 Issue

LAYING HOLD ON ETERNAL LIFE

Helen Wood Bauman

According to the Scriptures, real life is eternal. It never begins and never ends, but it coexists with God, who is one infinite Life. One's true life, then, is not found in the flesh, but in Spirit. Paul enjoined his young friend Timothy to "lay hold on eternal life," and he explained that this is done by fleeing evil and following "after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness" (I Tim. 6:11, 12). Christian Science shows that eternal life is not attained by dying, but by expressing the divine nature, which is eternal. The path of eternal life does not lie in unknown future realms, but in the familiar present expression of such God-derived qualities as justice, love, integrity, and wisdom.

Mary Baker Eddy says in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 273), "The truth of life, or life in truth, is a scientific knowledge that is portentous; and is won only by the spiritual understanding of Life as God, good, ever-present good, and therefore life eternal." Realizing that through goodness alone we demonstrate immortality, we give up the generally accepted belief that death can be advantageous, and the dread of dying fades from our thought. The human expression of good must continue to unfold until it has dispelled the universal belief that all must die. The experience called death does not indicate the loss of any progress made toward immortality. Good lives on, forever expressed through the identity that individualizes it.

This is one of the lessons learned from the transfiguration, that remarkable experience related in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew, when Moses and Elias appeared and talked with Christ Jesus. Then Peter, James, and John, who were present, caught a glimpse of the glory of eternal life in Spirit. They entered momentarily into the Shekinah, the "bright cloud" which overshadowed them and out of which came the divine message (verse 5), "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." The eternal continuity of identity was definitely implied by the presence of those who had left earth centuries before. Also the lesson is seen that only through obedience to the moral law represented by Moses, through the Christian demand to prove the power of Spirit over matter represented by Jesus, and through Christian Science, the prophetical discernment of absolute being as represented by Elias, does one lay hold on eternal life and prove himself to be God's immortal son.

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