"If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death" (John 8:51). These authoritative words of Christ Jesus, the Founder of Christianity, vitally challenge every student of the Bible to follow the Master's teachings and to avail himself now of the great fact that man's immortality is a present and provable reality. As we obey these teachings, thought is detached irrevocably from that which prophesies or fears an opposite to life, and the pathway to reality—to Life eternal—opens wide. This pathway must be through the transformation and transfiguration of the human, even as these were experienced by the Master, until the ascending thought crowns the victory over the flesh with glory.
In the consciousness of Christ Jesus, immortality was inherent, instinctive, fundamental. He acknowledged no human father. He challenged and defied the limiting statements of the Jews by declaring (John 8:58), "Before Abraham was, I am," linking preexistence with coexistence. He lifted up the standard of scientific living and divine healing and revealed life's purpose to be spiritual ascendancy over all material beliefs. He proved in progressive measure that he could heal every form of inharmony, physical, mental, and moral. He lived by divine authority and exercised and maintained this authority hourly in order to benefit and to bless all men. He brought to humanity a consciousness of abundant life.
Under the marginal heading "The present immortality" in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 428), "The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal." And she continues with tremendous significance, "We must hold forever the consciousness of existence, and sooner or later, through Christ and Christian Science, we must master sin and death." This, then, is the purpose of life; this, the goal before the student of Christian Science: to prove now that man is immortal, to "hold forever the consciousness of existence." The false beliefs called sin, disease, and death, which would seemingly disrupt the continuity of life, must be obliterated; then will immortality be embraced in consciousness without interruption or intermission.
