MAN is more than physical sense can outline or describe. We may enumerate all the organs or divisions of the human body, and yet include nothing essential to immortality or to real manhood. When we refer to our highest sense of man we invariably do so in terms of mind. All that is included in the mortal, material concept of man is in a state of perpetual change and decay, though the individual identity is not altered nor impaired by these processes. The physical form of man dies daily in some degree, and yet the real life of man remains uninjured. Is life any more affected when material law declares the entire body dead? We cannot speak of man as dead in terms of mind, but of matter only; hence in Mind man must live on continuously, unaffected by, because not included in, material conditions.

Although the Founder of Christianity declared that those who kept his sayings should not see death, the possibility of living on without dying has been deemed too transcendentally spiritual for human attainment. The belief that life proceeds from something other than God, or good, having no truth in it, eventually collapses in the opposite belief of death. This consequent of a false view of Life being so inevitable, mortals have declared death a divine, unescapable law, and thus have laid upon God the terrible and revolting charge of destroying His own offspring. From this unlovely concept of God, who is Love and Life and Truth only, Christian Science would turn human thought to some truer apprehension of the Supreme Being, as having no partnership with nor complicity in sin or death.

While the logic of Scripture and the demonstrations of Jesus support the Christian Science teaching that death is unreal, because not of God, the present human sense of existence is on too low a plane fully to realize the exhaustless vitality expressed in God's spiritual man. Thus mortals, when engulfed in the swelling flood of acquired beliefs and fears, are borne out from the cognizance of present environment into that plane or condition of human consciousness called the hereafter, or beyond the grave. Just what lies across this "great divide," is the mystery that troubles the world, a mystery that has ever attracted the hope and fear of the weary and sinning human race.

While Christian Scientists do not deny the phenomenon of death as a tenacious but temporary human belief, the result of mortal ignorance of Life as God, they are endeavoring to obey their Leader's teaching by cultivating faith in Life rather than death. That which appears on the surface is not always the fact, as daily experience proves. What death appears to be and do was not accepted as fact by Jesus, but rejected, and his example should appeal to all who have faith in it. What he said and did regarding death has the same authority and force as what he said and did regarding sin and disease. While our growth in goodness and spirituality may be as yet too feeble to prove completely all that we believe, we should be thankful that Jesus has done so, thus placing his teachings forever above mere speculation. Christian Scientists accept as real not that which is seen but that which is unseen to material sense, and in this they feel that they are doing only what the Scriptures enjoin upon them. The whole tenor of inspired Scriptural teaching is that God only is the Life of man, hence for man to die must be a mistake; and Christian Scientists are seeking to understand this teaching and to make it practical.

The problem before every mortal is how to be delivered from evil, a term that includes all that is known as sin, disease, and death, with all the untold miseries that follow in their wake. The evil conditions in human thought, of which death is the outcome, are not evaded by dying, any more than the ills of the flesh are avoided by getting sick. The period required for the perfect solution of the problem of being, for our growth out of the flesh and evil into the stature of perfect man, may not, perhaps, be encompassed before the shadow of mortality falls across our path; but we may know that individual character and identity are no more affected by it than by the darkness that has divided to-day from yesterday. Christian Science has proven the unreality of disease manifestations, and by the same understanding of Principle maintains that the immortality of man is unbroken, despite the material evidence to the contrary. That there is no death is the joyous note of Christianity, the glorious sunburst of truth in Christian Science, scattering the clouds of sorrow, and giving mortals a glimpse of those higher planes of being to which Jesus has led the way, and where God alone is the light and the Life of man.

Is it truth or is it error, a right or a wrong law, that has laid upon mankind such an awful burden as the doom of death, separating loved ones, and draping the world in perpetual mourning? What human sense of pity and love can measure the depths of mortal sorrow, the anguish of stricken hearts beating pitifully against the unresponsive silence of the grave? What but a heart of stone could behold the heartache, the unfathomable misery, the blinding, bitter tears, that daily mark the course of mortal being, and not melt before it, or joyfully deliver if possessed of the power? What but an unconceivable monstrosity, devoid of love or pity, could darken the joy of being with such a cruel, bitter curse, and yet require in return the homage of our love and reverence? Thanks to God and Christian Science that this pagan thought of God is passing out of Christianity, thereby giving mortals the liberty to love instead of the necessity to fear Him.

If it were true that man really died, what healing balm would remain wherewith to minister to the broken heart, or to comfort the widow and the fatherless? When Jesus gave back her son to the widow of Nain, he gave the lie to death. His tender, pitying love, expressing the divine compassion, was not called forth because he believed in the necessity or reality of suffering and sorrow, but because of mortal ignorance of man's true being, permanent in God. Our Master's sympathy for this extremity of earthly sorrow was touchingly expressed at the grave of his friend Lazarus, and he there exposed the falsity of the death claim in his demonstration of the indestructibility of Life and its manifestation. In this he also showed the needlessness of human grief, for was not the loved one alive and well even when material law pled for decay and corruption? Our present understanding of the Christ-truth may be too material to recall our friends from the shadow that seems to envelop our sense of them; but we may know that with them as with Lazarus life has gone on unbroken and uncorrupted.

The grace and charm of manhood and womanhood are not constituted of flesh and blood, and so are immune from the material law of waste and decay. The pleasure of true friendship and the joy of companionship never drew their life from matter, and are not involved in the ruin of any material concept. A melody does not lose its sweetness because ears have ceased to hear it. The beliefs of material perception, sight, sound, touch, do not decide what is, but what seems to be, and hence cannot be interpreters of truth. That which God decrees for man is all he can legitimately know and experience, and what man reflects of good must abide with him forever.

The gracious qualities of departed friends, their generous impulses, kindly sympathies, and loyal love, have not been stifled, nor even touched, by death. All that makes man lovable and good belongs to Mind, over which the grave has no power. (Science and Health, p. 291.) Whatever was true and good is so forever. Beauty and joy, constancy, tenderness, and love, were never laid away in the tomb, nor deprived of their perennial expression. These are emanations of the divine nature, and are not influenced by the supposed law of mortality. Death has no part in God, and hence has no cognizance of goodness, no knowledge of love, no consciousness, here or hereafter, of God's ideal, sinless man. What can it do even in the hour of its seeming triumph but betray its falsity, since it leaves the good in man intact? Mortals may find it hard to disbelieve that their friends have died, with all the phenomena of that belief before them; but to those who have passed through the shadow of the death valley, who have awakened from this nightmare of human error with consciousness and life unimpaired, in action or embodiment, has been revealed what Jesus proved in his resurrection, viz., the reality of Life, the illusion of death. Christians must some time learn the power of Truth over this as well as over other forms of error. No sweeter assurance of man's continuous being has ever fallen upon human ears than that conveyed in our Lord's words to Mary, "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

Just what may be the conditions and environments of those "on the other side," is not so important as to know that man is ever within the consciousness of God, in whose presence is fulness of joy. To him who has obeyed his highest ideal, life must be progressive hereafter as well as here. The activities of courageous and noble purpose gather fresh impulse and strength from every lesson and experience, bearing onward to fulfilment the heart's pure desire. To pass from holy work here does not mean idleness hereafter, but continued service in the line of light until the Master's example has been followed to its highest point. Life must ever grow broader and more invincible to such an one. No effort or operation of evil can narrow the opportunities or the privileges of the consecrated Christian. Wherever error advances its claims, whether on this or some other plane of belief, there will the champions of Truth be needed. Human wisdom is very finite and reaches little farther than it sees. We need a broader comprehension of being, wherein death does not mark the finis of the human problem but is one of its errors, the last to be corrected and overcome through an understanding of Truth. Until this understanding is attained, mortals must continue their strife with error's delusions, ever working and growing, ever climbing upward toward the summit of man's perfect spiritual consciousness.

Our Master has wisely said that the evil of the present is sufficient for us to meet without taking thought of that which may await us. And so while Christian Scientists make no especial claim for themselves, they desire to think and talk as little as possible of death as well as of sickness, rather to devote their thought and attention to health and life. Nevertheless they desire, so far as they may, to minister to those in sorrow, to bind up the broken-hearted, to bear the message of Life instead of death to men. Let us rejoice for all the good that has been and is being manifested, and for the blessed assurance that man ever lives and moves in God. Hand may not clasp hand, nor voices mingle in sweet discourse, but the Father's care still shelters us, whether here or there. In God's perfect creation each has his appointed place and work, unhindered by the fitful shadows of false mortal beliefs, which have no coming or going in the love-lighted universe of Mind. Some time every wrong must cease, every error yield to Truth, every shadow in human consciousness be swept away; then man will behold himself as God's image and likeness.

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