MAN is more than physical sense can outline or describe. We may enumerate all the organs or divisions of the human body, and yet include nothing essential to immortality or to real manhood. When we refer to our highest sense of man we invariably do so in terms of mind. All that is included in the mortal, material concept of man is in a state of perpetual change and decay, though the individual identity is not altered nor impaired by these processes. The physical form of man dies daily in some degree, and yet the real life of man remains uninjured. Is life any more affected when material law declares the entire body dead? We cannot speak of man as dead in terms of mind, but of matter only; hence in Mind man must live on continuously, unaffected by, because not included in, material conditions.
Although the Founder of Christianity declared that those who kept his sayings should not see death, the possibility of living on without dying has been deemed too transcendentally spiritual for human attainment. The belief that life proceeds from something other than God, or good, having no truth in it, eventually collapses in the opposite belief of death. This consequent of a false view of Life being so inevitable, mortals have declared death a divine, unescapable law, and thus have laid upon God the terrible and revolting charge of destroying His own offspring. From this unlovely concept of God, who is Love and Life and Truth only, Christian Science would turn human thought to some truer apprehension of the Supreme Being, as having no partnership with nor complicity in sin or death.
While the logic of Scripture and the demonstrations of Jesus support the Christian Science teaching that death is unreal because not of God, the present human sense of existence is on too low a plane fully to realize the exhaustless vitality expressed in God's spiritual man. Thus mortals, when engulfed in the swelling flood of acquired beliefs and fears, are borne out from the cognizance of present environment into that plane or condition of human consciousness called the hereafter, or beyond the grave. Just what lies across this "great divide," is the mystery that troubles the world, a mystery that has ever attracted the hope and fear of the weary and sinning human race.
