When Christ Jesus said (John 6:63), "It is the spirit that quickeneth," he spoke in the present tense, signifying that the life-giving or creative action of Spirit, God, is a continuing operation. Paul stressed the same truth when he wrote of "the inward man" as being "renewed day by day" (II Cor. 4: 16). Those who grasp the meaning of these Scriptural teachings through Christian Science find full comfort when loved human ties are severed by the grim touch of death. They know man as spiritual, as refreshing his energies of life at the continuing fount of being, and they do not grieve, for they see death as the figment of a mortal dream. They think of life in the present tense, think of man's being in terms of eternal presence. They exercise spiritual sense to perceive man in Science as God creates him, deathless and perfect.
Mary Baker Eddy says in "Pulpit and Press" (p. 5), "When the light of one friendship after another passes from earth to heaven, we kindle in place thereof the glow of some deathless reality." Our thought of man rises from earth to heaven as we reject the belief that the tenuous illusion of flesh is man and find him, instead, in the enduring substance of goodness. It is not matter, but the invisible elements of purity, tenderness, understanding, and unselfed love that comprise the man God evolves, and the understanding of these facts is leading mankind to final freedom from mortality.
Christian Science reveals man as the idea of divine Mind, as God's idea, and as coexistent with the Mind whose knowing gives its ideas perpetual, conscious existence. God is forever expressing Himself, and man, His expression, is forever complete, his selfhood a continuing unfoldment of God's living forces of wisdom and love. Mind and its ideas are never absent, and one who turns from the material senses to Mind in order to find man's identity touches the substance of "deathless reality," and the pain of separation is assuaged.
