Life Is Indestructible

ROBERT P. MARSH, JR.

The apparent inconsistency between Christian ideology and the warfare which involves destruction of human lives results in deep questionings in the minds of our fighting men. One may well ask how he can be an agent for destroying life and at the same time profess a religion which teaches that Life is indestructible.

The fact is that Life is indestructible and eternal, for Life is God. There is no death. There is no conceivable weapon or means by which man, God's idea, can be deprived of the Life which is eternally his. To shoot a mortal and then deduce that you have deprived man of infinite Life is as erroneous as contending that you render a mathematical truth extinct by burning a piece of paper on which a misstatement of it is written. God's idea, spiritual man, exists secure in Mind even though what is called death happens to a mortal, as does the mathematical truth exist after the destruction of the paper on which an incorrect statement of it is written.

According to corporeal sense, death is some mysterious process whereby life ceases to exist. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy lifts the veil of mystery from death and defines it in part as follows (p. 584): "An illusion, the lie of life in matter; the unreal and untrue; the opposite of Life." Here we see that death is a belief in the impossible. A person believing life is material sensation and material thinking closely associated with a material body has not yet found the real Life, which is Spirit, God. As the Apostle Paul puts it, "For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."

We read on page 291 of Science and Health, "As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be after death, until probation and growth shall effect the needed change." Who can say that a bullet may kill a man but that sin and corporeality do not? If there is no change in mortal man after the experience called death, he who has been enslaved by corporeal sense is no more expressing true Life after than before he was shot.

A soldier is bound by solemn oath to protect and defend by the means his country determines all that is for the nation's good. His enemy and his country's enemy is the carnal mind. If some mortals are so closely identified with the false ideologies of the material mind that they yield themselves to its godless, aggressive purposes, then they will have to continue to suffer even maybe to seeming destruction, until their wrong thinking has been overcome.

It is not for us to outline the way whereby all error will be destroyed, but it is our duty to listen for the Father's voice and to be obedient to His commands. The present conflict is an uncovering of the basic evil thinking in masses of mortals and the imperative need for its annihilation. Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 540): "The muddy river-bed must be stirred in order to purify the stream. In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God's law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin." Is not the foregoing a clear analysis of the present trend of events?

The present tendency towards international co-operation indicates a greater willingness to uncover, grapple with, and master the evil forces that would divide men. Every victory brings us nearer to perfection and peace. Gradually the stream of human thinking, which has been deeply stirred, will clear. Mortals will increasingly obey God's law as they lose their willingness to sin, and evil will be eliminated from consciousness. Then men and nations will enter into the freedom of their rightful inheritance They will be conscious of that Life indestructible and eternal of which Jesus said to his disciples, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."

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