Immortality ANNIE M. KNOTT, CSD         Job's mournful question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" has been asked by many mortals, and who shall say that in most cases doubt has not overshadowed the answer. When material sense prevails doubt will always be present, as it was in Job's case; but when the spiritual sense dominates we shall be able to say as he did later, "I know that my redeemer liveth." Christ Jesus gave the whole world a strong assurance when he said, "Because I live, ye shall live also." Every day and hour of his earthly experience was given to proving that Life is not subject to matter, hence not subject to disease or death. On this point we have in Science and Health (p. 349) the unequivocal statement that "neither Life nor man dies;" and on page 581 we are told that the reflection of Truth is "proved to be as immortal as its Principle." Again we read (p. 204), "It is evil that dies; good dies not."          The long centuries of mortal belief and experience all show that the material body is not immortal, while spiritual understanding declares that it must be put off, with all the erroneous beliefs which it represents. That the world's thought is changing greatly of late years is evidenced by a statement of Sir Oliver Lodge, in which he declared that the body does not represent the individual, and "that death merely marks the end of a certain grouping of physical materials." He goes on to say that "consciousness, will, honor, love," etc., are "similarly stamped with immortality." Christian Science goes much farther in declaring that everything which is like God, good, is of necessity immortal.          In "Memoriam" we find a brief but forceful putting of the human sense of separation caused by death, when the poet says, — He [death] put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak. We might say to this, that materiality often puts us very far apart without the experience called death; sometimes without distance or separating walls. Some phase of error may serve to put apart those who are physically near each other, but as Paul said so long ago, "the middle wall of partition" is taken away in Christ, Truth, and then we see eye to eye, and love heart to heart, no matter where we may be. Christian Science annihilates distance, when the Christly help is needed, as it did in Jesus' time; and does not this prove that as "neither life nor death" can "separate us from the love of God," neither can death separate us from those we love? Concerning this our revered Leader says, "In Science, individual good derived from God, the infinite All-in-all, may flow from the departed to mortals" (Science and Health, p. 72); but this is very different from material communications supposed to come from those who ought to be advancing spiritually.          When the Jews asked the great Teacher to enlighten them respecting the future, and presented the case of a woman who had had seven husbands, he referred them to the Scriptures. Now no such case was mentioned in the Scriptures, but Jesus turned their thought to a universal truth which covered the whole question. He reminded them of the divine declaration to Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;" and he added, "For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him." If we fail to understand anything which relates to our progress, it is because we cling to a narrow, personal sense of things, and fail to study the Bible and its "Key," Science and Health, for the truth which will help us to solve satisfactorily every life problem. In constantly living up to our highest sense of Truth, great illumination comes to us and assurances of man's spiritual identity and immortality meet us on every page of these books, inspiring us to press on to the heights where all the mists of mortal belief will have rolled away, and where we shall Find the joy of loving as we never loved before; Loving on unchilled, unhindered, Loving once, forevermore.   "Immortality" by Annie M. Knott, CSD Christian Science Sentinel, October 24, 1908

 

| Home | Library |

Copyright © 1996-2008 CSEC