Article January 14, 1922 Issue

Life Without End

ROBERT C. BRYANT

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.

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