BECAUSE the human mind is finite and is conscious of its own limitations, knowing of a surety its own end, it would make everything finite, and establish the supposition that all existence must have an end. This is, of course, a direct contradiction of all that is true, and is a denial of God. Our very first true concept of God is that He is infinite and eternal, so that neither God Himself nor anything related to Him could have an end. But the human mind is never consistent. It establishes its premises without reason and without any consideration of the absurdity of its conclusions, and mortals accept these premises blindly and base human experience upon them. And so nothing is more common than the use of the expression "to the end," as applied to all experience and even to life itself. How important to stop and ask what it is that can have or come to an end.

Now, no one would say that God can have an end, for God in His very nature must be infinite and eternal. But it is equally true that Life cannot have an end. We frequently hear reference to eternal life, as if there were two kinds of life, one eternal and the other not. But such an idea is impossible. Life is one; there are not two kinds of Life. On page 468 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," the textbook of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy says, in answer to the question "What is Life?" "Life is divine Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit. Life is without beginning and without end. Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity."

All life is from God, and all life is eternal; it never ends. There is no such thing as mortal life. The terms are contradictory. The expression "mortal life" really means a limited or false sense of Life, the absence of Life,—full, complete, real Life. When the discouraged mortal talks of "ending it all," he is speaking with the grossest ignorance of what Life or being really is; and if he should actually try to end it by destroying his material body, he might only find that the body has no life and that he has not even destroyed his sense of life nor solved any problem of existence, but that even greater atonement must be made for his lack of understanding of God and his moment of weakness. "Nothing can interfere with the harmony of being nor end the existence of man in Science," Mrs. Eddy tells us (Science and Health, p. 427). What, then, with reference to Life, can come to an end? The answer is implied in all that has been said. Only the false, limited belief about Life, only the error of the human mind that life has some other origin than in God or is dependent upon or exists in matter. It is this false premise that Life is material or is in matter that leads to the absurd conclusion that Life can have an end, and from this follow the brood of fears that grow into all forms of sin, disease, and the belief of death. When we know that Life is God and can have no end, that very knowledge is the end of all that can have an end, the end of all fear and of all that seems to follow from it.

Of course Life, truly understood, is all-inclusive. There is nothing real but Life itself; for Life is God. But if this is not entirely clear we may take up any of the conditions or realities of Life and ask of them, Can they have an end, and is there anything about them that can end? For example, Truth is clearly a reality. Can Truth have an end? The question provokes no argument. What is true is true in every place and always. Even the simplest truth that two and two are four always was and always will be true and is true everywhere. But it may be said that what is true for one person is not true for another, and what is true at one time may not be true at another. That is to say that truth may come to an end. But that is just the effort of the human mind to give limit to reality. There are not two kinds of truth any more than there are two kinds of life. There is not a relative truth any more than there is a mortal life. The very meaning of the word Truth is absolute, just as Life is absolute, and what the world calls truth is just the false or limited sense of Truth, the absence of real, complete Truth, just as mortal life is the absence of real, complete Life, the false, limited belief about Life. Limitations to Truth exist only in the false, mortal mind, and all that can come to an end are the limitations themselves, not Truth.

And so good is the reality and has no end. What a comfort and encouragement to many people to know that good cannot have an end. Every one is conscious of good, and a great deal of good, now, to-day; but mortals live in fear that good may come to an end to-morrow. Most mortal ills are based not on the absence of good to-day but on the fear of what will happen to-morrow. Some one has said it would help us all to remember that to-day is the day we worried about yesterday. Now good cannot come to an end any more than God or Life or Truth can end; for good is God. Good is the love of God; it cannot end; it is eternal as God is eternal. God can never cease loving his idea nor providing all good.

But again it may be said that good is often finite, good for one and not for another, good at one time and not another. But there are not two kinds of good any more than there are two kinds of life, or two kinds of truth. Mortal belief, in turn, would limit good; but just as in the case of Life and Truth, what the world calls good is not really good at all but a limited or false sense of good, a good that is purely material, really a belief in the absence of good; and the only thing about good that can come to an end is the false belief about it, the belief that God is absent, and not good itself.

With a certain sense of faith in God, Job said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." And sometimes we may hear one say that he will trust in God even "to the bitter end." But this indicates a limited or false faith in God. The only end that can come through true faith in God is not the end of good but the end of evil, the end of the belief in the absence of the love of God, and this end is not bitter but sweet; this end does not slay us but gives us life.

And so it is clear that no reality can come to an end. Nothing that is an expression of God or a part of true life can come to an end. The only thing that can end is the false belief or error about Life, the false sense of the limitation or absence of Life. The very world, which the Bible speaks of as coming to an end is the false material belief about world and not the true world of God's creating. In Science and Health, on page 96, Mrs. Eddy writes: "This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. On one side there will be discord and dismay; on the other side there will be Science and peace. The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases until their nothingness appears. These disturbances will continue until the end of error, when all discord will be swallowed up in spiritual Truth." The only thing that can come to an end, then, is error, the false sense of reality, the belief of limitation or absence of God; illusion; ignorance. Life, Truth, and Love are eternal realities, always available; and as mankind grows to understand God and man's eternal oneness with God, all error, mortality, and limitation will come to an end in the fullness and completeness of the consciousness of the eternal, divine Love.

Copyright, 1922, by The Christian Science Publishing Society, Falmouth and St. Paul Streets, Boston, Massachusetts. Entered at Boston post office as second-class matter. Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on July 11, 1918.