EVERY student of Christian Science can and ultimately must declare and realize that God is his Life. No one except Christ Jesus has understood so much of the meaning conveyed by those words as Mrs. Eddy; but all may gather fresh inspiration as they realize more and more that God is the only Life.
The sincere student of Christian Science early learns that to approximate the understanding of this fact and be at-one with Life he must live consistently with its deepest import and nature. It is apparent from the start that false thinking must be eliminated; all animality, all materiality, must lessen in human thought until it finally disappears, so that Soul, or Life, may be seen and proved as ever present and eternal. This means the overcoming of all that would usurp and supplant one's native childlike faith in God. It must mean the renunciation of self, for "God requires our whole heart" (Church Manual, Art. VIII, Sect. 15); we must abandon all beliefs that would retard our demonstration of pure Life in its present eternality. It must mean that all else must be secondary to the sacred privilege of so living that God may be glorified in daily experience. It must mean that society, human and material dependences, false pleasures and innocent ones that demand time which should be given to needed spiritual work, must be subordinated to the things of Spirit, God.
Life, God, is perfect, and always has been perfect. An evil, sick, or sorrowful past can seem real only in the human dream or misconception of life; but evil never existed except as an illusion. The belief of a sick or sinful past, then, is a lie; being without actual existence, it has no right to be perpetuated as a reality, and should be contemplated only for the lesson it may convey. "God requireth that which is past"—requireth that we admit nothing as real that is contrary to or opposed to uncontaminated Life. Isaiah said, "Thus saith the Lord, ... Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any." Paul, with a developing sense of spiritual immunity from an evil past, said, "Forgetting those things which are behind, ... I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."
