Christ Jesus had much to say about life because his mission was to destroy every phase of mortality and to show humanity how to demonstrate the Life that overcomes death. By his example and by the many healings he brought about he proved that our eternal life is linked with obedience to God.

Speaking of the Father, who gave him a commandment, what he should say and what he should speak, Jesus said (John 12:50), "I know that his commandment is life everlasting." And praying to God in behalf of his followers on the night of his arrest in Gethsemane, he said (John 17:3), "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."

In order to obey God's commandment of life everlasting, we must know what that life is. The Master's statement that he must be known as one whom God had "sent" implied his preexistence or his eternal coexistence with the one Life, God. The Christ, being the true idea of sonship, as Christian Science reveals, includes every son of God, every identity in its eternal existence as Life's expression. Since Life knows no beginning and no ending, neither does its expression.

Jesus was conscious of his preexistence; he said (John 8:14), "I know whence I came, and whither I go." But that preexistence was spiritual, not human. For us to know our preexistent real self does not involve human memory; it involves spiritual vision of what we really are now—the incorporeal reflection of Life. If we glimpse what we are now in Science, we understand what we have always been and always will be. And we are able to manifest the power over mortality that the knowledge of preexistent life brings.

Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 189), "The meek Nazarene's steadfast and true knowledge of preexistence, of the nature and the inseparability of God and man,—made him mighty." Knowing our eternal life by living the Christliness that is eternal, we obey the command of divine Life; and nothing else—no amount of piety, ritualism, religious affectation, or theoretical reasoning about Truth—can substitute such obedience.

People often think of life as simply existence and do not delve into its meaning any more deeply than to consider the coming and going of mortals with their many experiences. Not so did Jesus. He recognized real life as spiritual and human life as important because mankind are able to obey the divine will and thus express the power to destroy evil, which wells up in the consciousness struggling for spiritual freedom.

Mrs. Eddy says in "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 58), "With our Master, life was not merely a sense of existence, but an accompanying sense of power that subdued matter and brought to light immortality, insomuch that the people 'were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.'"

If the student of Christian Science finds it difficult to fulfill the wonderful possibilities of life revealed in the works of our Master, this is because the student's sense of existence is still too solidly personal and materialistic. It is one thing to accept the theology of Christian Science, which interprets the life and teaching of Jesus; it is another thing to make the effort to demonstrate that theology. Yet nothing less than demonstration is obedience to the divine command to live the life that is eternal.

No one can stop existing, and now we have the opportunity to prove all the spiritual possibilities of life. Suicide is a desperate effort to escape the demand of God to obey Life by living. Suicide is never the remedy for any ill. When life is understood as inseparable from divine Life, the will of the carnal mind to destroy what it calls life is silenced.

The whole world would awake to a fresh sense of the power that subdues matter if it would recognize that God is the only Life and that man is the immortal evidence of that one Life. All consciousness of good hints this Life, but mortal consciousness must be cleared away as evil and unreal in order that man's deathless existence in Life may be revealed.

A glorious experience it is to realize that we live because our creative Principle is Life. We need to treasure our sense of life, keep our consciousness purified of the sinful elements of mortality, and in this way express the power of life over death. We must make the best of existence through our obedience to the demands of the Maker who gives us life.

Right now we are in the midst of divine Life and are capable of awaking to our existence in it. Immortality does not refer to a future existence. Immortality is ever present. It must be experienced now in the good we do. Sin weakens our sense of life because it takes us out of the mental area in which divine Life is known as All.

Meekness before the mighty fact of eternal life makes one willing to persist in living through any struggle until the power of Life over mortality triumphs. Then the intelligence, purity, love, and wisdom that make up man in Life's likeness are freed to possess one and make one obedient to the great overshadowing commandment of God, which is life everlasting.

Helen Wood Bauman