The Psalmist said, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord." ^{Ps. 118:17;} Here living is connected with spiritual action— declaring the works of God. There is a difference between trying merely to stay alive in the human sense of existence and awakening to the spiritual sense of life in God. Christian Science reveals life as never beginning and never ending, as coexistent with the creator. But this life—real life—is the manifestation of the one Life, or God, and it is known only in the measure that the divine character is reflected.

Christ Jesus healed the sick and dying, but he did not teach that life is in the flesh. Instead he declared, "The flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." ^{John 6:63;} In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mary Baker Eddy says of Jesus, "Understanding the nothingness of material things, he spoke of flesh and Spirit as the two opposites,—as error and Truth, not contributing in any way to each other's happiness and existence." ^{Science and Health, p. 356;} And then she repeats the Master's words quoted above, "The flesh profiteth nothing."

Once we find through Christian Science that to live rather than to die is the demand of Life, we make a consistent effort to stay alive, to prove that our unity with divine Life can never be broken. We refuse to think that we might as well pass on to the next experience.

Death should be resisted and never admitted as a possible escape. It is often easier for the human being to die than to live; but it is nothing short of disloyalty to God to wish to die or to admit that death can help anyone. Mrs. Eddy says: "The universal belief in death is of no advantage. It cannot make Life or Truth apparent.'' ^{p. 42 .}

To resist death because of its falsity helps the individual stay alive. And to resist it in order to prove the truth that man cannot die because he is Life's expression of goodness is even more effective. This resistance brings nearer the day when mortality will be swept from the experience of the human race.

It is essential to health to know that man's life is the uninterrupted reflection of Life, or Spirit, for this knowledge destroys the fear of the unknown that nags at everyone. And fear is at the bottom of every sickness. Freedom from fear of death subdues the physical senses, which are mortality's very self; and when the senses are subdued, destructive mental conditions cannot externalize themselves in chemical, physical, electrical, and other kinds of disorder called disease. Living becomes more and more spontaneous when the material senses are subordinated to spiritual sense.

Keep alive spiritual sense in thought, and a fresh consciousness of life is gradually experienced. Demonstrate true consciousness, which is Life's idea, and the human faculties of seeing, hearing, and remembering will be strengthened. Not through death will the spiritual sense of man's faculties be realized, but through a higher demonstration of Life.

We should resist deterioration of the faculties instead of giving up praying about them. The true idea of everything created is included in spiritual consciousness; and it is the true idea that destroys the mortal suggestion of decay. Deterioration is part of the belief of mortality, the belief that man is flesh and must succumb to death. Every restoration of health through Christian Science healing gives a glimpse of uninterrupted life in Spirit.

To demonstrate eternal life, one needs to love and reflect the divine qualities of thought that are eternal. Joy, unselfed love, integrity, justice, and the like hold one in the deathless consciousness of being, whereas merely declaring that life never dies might not be very effective. One must live what he declares and do it with depth of consecration.

Mortality is false, and life is true. So a major effort on the part of humanity must be to live, to destroy mortality by living the kind of life that cannot die because it is inseparable from the Life that is immortal Being.

The threat of death is something for us to face boldly with the understanding of man as made in Life's likeness and as incapable of separating himself from immortality. Our efforts to stay alive are not efforts to prolong the belief that we live in the flesh but to prove that we do not live in it. For we live in Life, and Life awaits our realization of our eternal security in it.

Helen Wood Bauman