Editorial June 1, 1968 Issue

Christianity and Eternal Life

Helen Wood Bauman

By his example Christ Jesus showed that the purpose of the Christianity he founded was to reveal man's eternal life. He constantly proved the spiritual fact of immortality. When he healed sin, he removed the main obstacle to the demonstration of eternal life, which is sinless. When he overcame sickness, he restored health, an essential element of God-bestowed life. When he raised the dead, he gave actual proof that being never stops. In his resurrection he made plain that human existence extends beyond the grave—that it must continue until perfection is attained. Finally, in his ascension he showed that all mankind must put off the mortal sense of life in flesh and find their real existence in Spirit. Throughout his ministry he was disclosing deathless man, the man who images forth the eternal Life that is God.

Perhaps every Christian does not realize that the demand of Christianity is to prove that life is not subject to death. On the evening before his crucifixion Jesus prayed to the Father, "Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him." His prayer continued, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."^{John 17:1–3;}

Christian Science interprets the words and works of Jesus and reveals that he was always proving that Spirit is the only source of life and that "the flesh," as he once declared, "profiteth nothing."^{6:63 ;} Mary Baker Eddy says, "The divine Science of Life alone gives the true sense of life and of righteousness, and demonstrates the Principle of life eternal; even the Life that is Soul apart from the so-called life of matter or the material senses."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, pp. 273, 274;}