IT is apparent that there can be no state, experience, or event which is not related to and affected by our sense of life, and that the old saying might be fittingly rephrased so that it would read, "As a man thinketh in his heart about life, so is he." This seen, it follows that when a right sense of life is wanting, everything must inevitably go awry, and this is one explanation of the disharmony, disease, and defeats of human history.
For its every responsive student, Christian Science begets that nobler spiritual concept of life, which speedily inaugurates his escape from all materialistic theories regarding it. Of these, two command the more general consideration today, and first that which regards life as the phenomenon of material organization and which undertakes to prove that vital energy is but a form of physical energy. The problem of life's origin must be faced, and the effort to solve it grows ever more insistent and animated. Some are trying zealously to see the facts. With the aid of the most powerful magnifiers biologists are studying the cell, its distinctive ways and doings, —if haply they may divine its secret. Others, having lost courage in their efforts to locate the place and date of the molecular event, so that they might attend the birth of life, have concluded that its marvelously minute but forever fertile germs are latent in matter and hence do not have a genesis, or else that they have fallen upon the otherwise seedless and desert earth from out the interstellar spaces!
The other semimaterialistic view is that entertained by the great body of theists and Christian believers, who assert that God is the source of both life and matter; that while material organization does not explain life, it is essential to it as a divinely provided means of expression. In keeping with the story given in the second chapter of Genesis, they aver that when, at a given stage of cosmic history, the earth was duly prepared to support life, God implanted it in the otherwise dead stuff, and, since all that is evolved must first have been involved, every possibility of human history was potentially present in the protoplasm, which was duly taken in hand by evolution and brought to its present wondrous unfoldment.
