"NOTHING that lives ever dies, and vice versa." In this statement in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 374), Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has stated a profound spiritual truth, revolutionary indeed to mortal thought, but inspiring and helpful to those who are striving to let that Mind be in them "which was also in Christ Jesus."
By the average mortal, life is always thought of in terms of material existence, which is supposed to end sooner or later in what is called" death. How precarious is this material sense of life! At any moment any one or more of a thousand and one things may claim to occur to end it; and mankind lives constantly in fear of such a happening. True, there is widespread a belief in immortality, in life after death, but it is vague and uncertain, and for a large majority of people purely hypothetical. It is evident that the life to which Mrs. Eddy refers in the sentence quoted at the beginning of the article is something entirely different, because it never dies, and therefore cannot be at the mercy of any socalled power that claims to cause death. In other words, since it is eternal, immortal, infinite, and as none of these terms can be applied to materiality, the life referred to must be spiritual. Oh, yes, some one may say, I know there is spiritual life, but I cannot experience it until my material life here has ended; then I shall begin to live spiritually. It is this belief in two lives, the one material, the other spiritual, which Christian Science denies and corrects, pointing to God, Spirit, as the only source of Life, Life which can only be expressed spiritually.
Jesus often referred to life as eternal; and obviously, if this is so, there is no room for another sort of life, which is not eternal. What, then, is the human or material sense of life which appears to be real but is not? Christian Science declares it to be a counterfeit, a lie, from which seems to arise all inharmony, expressed in sin, disease, and death. In the words of the Christian Science textbook (p. 468): "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all."
