The one thing that has been accepted by mankind at large, and held as inevitable, is death. Death has not only been regarded as unavoidable, but it has been given the sacredness of a divine decree. Thus the thought of the race has centered upon it as the necessary finale of all earthly experience, and Christendom has tried to look upon it as a benevolent arrangement of a loving God. Over against this stands in sharp contrast the teachings of the New Testament, — Jesus' teaching, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;" Paul's assurance that Christ "hath abolished death;" his further declaration that "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death," — all these sayings vividly emphasize the fact that death is no part of the divine order of things; that it is not a friend but an enemy, and that it is to be destroyed.
The assurance that death is not a necessity, that it is possible for men to arrive at such a degree of spiritual understanding that their passing out of this earth experience shall not be through the gateway of death, but through the unfolding portals of eternal Life, this assurance is supported not only by the Scriptural record of Jesus, but by that of Elijah, Enoch, and probably Moses. In the face of all this Scriptural teaching and testimony, does not any kind of consistency demand that the Christian shall cease to assume and affirm the inevitableness of death, and instead that he shall affirm the possibility and seek the way of abolishing it with the understanding of Life? And if this is the work that the Christian ideal demands, the time to begin it is now. This high ideal has appeared as a visionary dream, or as something that could only arrive through some special divine dispensation of the future, because there appeared no rational way or means of proving it real and true. And yet the means have been at hand, and some degree of evidence has not been lacking to indicate how this divine possibility may be achieved.
Who has not seen this? Two people start out side by side in early years, in even circumstances, fairly matched in opportunity and ability. One chooses high ideals, the other gravitates towards that which is low. As the years go by this difference in direction and tendency is more and more accentuated, and these two come to live in totally different worlds of consciousness and interest. And now note the outer result: The one who lives and thinks coarsely becomes coarse, even in the fibers of his body; degradation of thought is marked in face, in figure, in some degree by every bodily element and action. On the other hand, the one who is living for things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, is manifesting these in his body, in so far as he believes in them and lives them. Here and there we see a man or woman who comes down to the ripeness of age with a kind of ethereal beauty; the body has become so refined as to seem to be a translucent medium through which shines the light of high spiritual and intellectual ideals. The very fiber and structure of the body has become finer, manifesting less and less of the character of matter, approaching more and more to the suggestion and semblance of the spiritual. Now suppose that this process could go on far enough; suppose this refining, this immaterialization of the body by the realization of high ideals, could go on to its ultimate; is it not quite a rational sequel to see how this body would disappear, because replaced by the substance and consciousness of Mind, just as a shadow becomes fainter and finally disappears before the effulgence of light?
