IN the ninth chapter of Mark is recorded that transcendent experience of Jesus known as the transfiguration. This record says that as they came down from the mountain Jesus charged his companions that they should not speak to any man of what they had seen until "the Son of man were risen from the dead." This evidently was the cause of much discussion among those disciples who had been with him; for the narrative continues, "And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
May it not be well for us, also, to question among ourselves what "rising from the dead" may mean? Have we freed ourselves from the belief that it is something that is to occur for us at some one future time; that it is in the nature of some single, far-off event? Or are we realizing that it must be to each one of us a continuous daily, yes, hourly process of rising above superstitious beliefs imposed by ignorance, false education, and false theology? The need is to see that every belief based on the theory of life in matter is a part of the so-called death-process, and that the experience we have been wont to call by the name of death is but a single phase of the universal belief of life apart from Mind, God. Paul has very succinctly summed up the matter in the sixth verse of the remarkable eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans in the words, "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."
It has been said that if the one evil, called devil, cannot make us fear a future hell it will try to make us hope for a future heaven! This indicates one of the strongest tendencies of the carnal mind, one of its greatest temptations,—procrastination,—an attempt to cause us to postpone our good, to believe that there will be more of good present and available at some future time than there is now, even to postpone our rising from dead beliefs into the immortality and eternal joy of divine ideas. But we have Mrs. Eddy's inspired definition of "resurrection" on page 593 of our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which enables us to hear, with understanding, that trumpet call of Scripture, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."
