Tenaciously throughout all ages, so far as we have record, humanity has clung to hope in life beyond the pale of mortal existence. Countless millions have professed a belief in life beyond the grave; but their ideas of what that life would be have been as antipodal as the poles, as divergent as their pursuits of happiness. Other multitudes have pondered the subject deeply without arriving at a satisfying conclusion; while not a few have given up the seemingly unsolvable problem in despair.
But the enigma of human existence is not impossible of solution when one gains the correct starting-point. Mary Baker Eddy has given no uncertain, halfway answer to the age-old question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" Many years of earnest study of the Scriptures convinced her, beyond a doubt, that not only did the Man of Galilee teach life everlasting as one of the chief cornerstones of the Christian religion, but that he and others demonstrated continuity of life, independent of material organization and free from any of the material elements whose apparent decay gave credence to the belief in death.
Hardly has the Biblical account of human affairs well started before we read of one who grew so spiritual in his thinking that matter ceased to be a reality to him; and he rose above, or out of, his material environment. This beautiful story, recorded in the fifth chapter of Genesis, depicts a man who "walked with God." How he must have grown in spiritual understanding as he continually contemplated the goodness of God to men! Finally, after years of steadfastness, purity, love, and good deeds had transformed him, until his human presence had, no doubt, become a benign benediction, Enoch relinquished completely his belief in mortality and disappeared to human view: "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him." His consciousness became so permeated with good, love, truth, life, that no room was left for mortal beliefs. He had risen above them.
