LIFE
W. John Murray
New
Thoughts on Old Doctrines
Divine Science Publishing Co.
New York, N.Y., 1918
[129] "He
that heareth my word, and believeth on
him that sent me, hath everlasting life,
and shall not come into condemnation; but
is passed from death unto life.
"I am come that they might have life, and
that they might have it more
abundantly.
"He that believeth on me hath everlasting
life.
"Because I live, ye shall live
also.
"In Christ, shall all be made
alive.
"As the Father hath life in himself; so
hath he given to the Son to have life in
himself:
"For with thee is the fountain of life:
in thy light shall we see light.
"And this is life eternal, that they
might know thee the only true God, and
Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
"My words are life to those that find
them, and health to all their
flesh.
"For to be carnally minded is death: but
to be spiritually minded is life and
peace.
"I have set before thee this day life and
good, and death and evil.
"Therefore choose life, that both thou
and thy seed may live."
[130]
BLANK
[131]
LIFE
"By faith
Enoch was translated that he should not
see death; and was not found, because God
had translated him: for before his
translation he had this testimony, that
he pleased God." --HEBREWS 11:5.
LIFE,
without doubt, is the most serious of all
the subjects with which the human mind
has to deal. It is so serious that in all
generations and among all people it has
been approached from every possible
angle, and men have studied life from
protoplasm to infinity. Through the
science of evolution men have studied
life from the mineral to mind; biologists
have made remarkable discoveries in the
phenomena which we call visible or
objective life; all of which shows that
the human mind regards the study of life
as the most essential in the universe.
When I say the human mind, I wish to be
understood as meaning, in this
connection, the progressive mind, the
thoughtful, investigative, [132] divinely
curious, mind; because, there are those
to whom life, unfortunately, is not
something to be studied, to whom life is
not a thing to be scientifically or
wisely directed, but something to be
waded through as best one can. There are
those, and I sometimes think they are in
the great majority, who feel that life is
rather a game of chance, something that
they do not know anything about,
something they confessedly admit they
cannot know anything about. According to
their own logic, they are here without
their own consent; according to this same
logic, they are just as unceremoniously
removed hence. To such as these, life is
therefore a transient experience which
begins with infancy and ends with death,
whether through old age, disease, or
sudden accident. This is the popular idea
concerning life: the human experience
embraced between that part of life which
we call the cradle period and the other
which we call the coffin period.
Life is
vastly more than this. The larger
interpretation of God and the newer
thought [133] of things are bringing us
to a fuller sense of the clearer
interpretation of life. Without this
clearer interpretation, life is hardly
worth living. It is fraught with chance
and change. If we are inclined to be
pessimistic at all, cast down by personal
experiences, we regard life as a rather
toilsome, tiresome sort of thing; we
regard this invisible world of ours as a
veritable vale of tears, something we
would like to get through with as quickly
as possible. Therefore, life must be
studied, not from the merely biological
point of view, nor from the
physiological, nor the intellectual, but
rather from the purely spiritual;
because, after all, the only point of
view we can get of life which is really
scientific, is the spiritual. Even the
so-called material scientists are
arriving at this conclusion. Modern
chemistry is revealing to us that matter
is neither life-giving nor
life-sustaining; that it is not something
which acts upon, but something which is
acted upon, and this by an invisible,
underlying principle which one might as
well call Life, or God, or Spirit, or
Love, as anything else. [134] It is the
invisible Reality of which all external
manifestations are but so many
projections into space. These are the
conclusions that modern physical science
is arriving at.
And so we
see that modern material science is
arriving, by the slow, tortuous
intellectual method, at the same
conclusion Jesus reached by the more
direct intuitional method of the Holy
Spirit.
After all,
life is invisible. No one has ever seen
life. You cannot touch, taste, smell,
see, hear, or feel it. Life is like mind
in this: none of the senses can take
cognizance of it. All that we have ever
seen of life are its visible
manifestations. So most of us have
studied life from the standpoint of its
visible manifestations, just as most of
us have studied nature from the
standpoint of her visible manifestations;
we have taken nature's convulsions, as
well as nature's beauties, as evidences
of what she is capable of accomplishing.
We have regarded nature as benevolent on
the one hand and malevolent on the other,
constructive on one side and destructive
on the other--all because [135] we have
watched the natural or visible
manifestations of what we call invisible
nature.
When it
comes to studying life, we take it from
this same objective point--we look with
eyes. We see it coming into birth. We see
what we call life, gay, pleasant, and
joyful, or sad, unpleasant and sorrowful.
We see it ending in death. And this, in
the past, that we have been pleased to
call life, is nothing more nor less than
the imperfect manifestations of it on the
visible plane. The science of ontology,
which is superior to the science of
biology, evolution, or physiology,
suggests to the inquisitive
mentality--the divinely curious mind--the
necessity for studying life at first hand
and not according to any of its visible
manifestations; we are therefore called
upon to study life from the standpoint of
the purely spiritual or the purely
scientific.
Life is not
what we call life. Jesus said that
life eternal consisted in a knowledge of
the only true God. "This is life eternal,
that they might know thee, the only true
[136] God.” Life eternal consists
of knowledge. There are those who are
perfectly satisfied with the
manifestations of things. For instance: A
man will go into a room, touch a button,
see that the room is suffused with light,
and never stop to question the
phenomenon. It is nothing to him. His
sole interest is to see that the room is
properly lighted, his sole care to touch
the button; everything is done for his
convenience. But there are those divinely
curious persons who are not satisfied
with the phenomenon, they are not
satisfied that the room is suffused with
light at a mere touch of a button. They
must know why; they must investigate the
science of it. Why does this phenomenon
take place? The mentally indolent man
says: “It is nothing to me. I do
not care why or how or by what method or
science it takes place. All I am
concerned in knowing is that it does take
place. I am satisfied to have the
light.” But when the switch will
not work, it is the divinely inquisitive
man who is able to rectify things. The
other man [137] must either remain in the
dark or get the assistance of some other
person.
Thus it is
with life. The mentally indolent man does
not care anything about life in the
abstract; he is more concerned about life
in the concrete--how to enjoy it, how to
get the most out of it, and almost
invariably from a merely physical point
of view; how he is going to cater to what
he calls life, representing to him
nothing higher than the merely physical;
how he is going to enjoy himself without
suffering the consequences; how he is
going to indulge his passions without
going through the necessary aftermath of
pain. These are the things that trouble
his mentality--beyond them, he has no
other concern.
Life is not
physical. For those who believe that the
sustenance of life depends upon the
physical, we can again call modern
science to our aid to convince them of
their mistake. It is comforting to know
that twentieth century science is
corroborating first century Christianity.
It is very comforting to me to know that
men like Sir Oliver [138] Lodge, Lord
Kelvin, and others, by scientific,
intellectual processes, are arriving at
the very same point of view Jesus held so
many hundreds of years ago--that life is
not sustained by matter.
This is made
very clear to us when we take the grosser
form of physical foods. Men graduate away
from what we call the material: the
mineral food, the things of the earth;
and we see how very much more necessary
the fluids are to man's physical life. It
is demonstrated beyond peradventure, that
water is more necessary to the sustenance
of physical life than is solid food; that
is, we can live longer without mineral
food than we can without water. Again, we
go up into the element of air; we can
live longer without water and mineral
food than we can without air. And now the
physical scientists tell us that back of
the air, without which it is impossible
for us to live, or move, or breathe,
there is that imponderable ether, which
is as much more refined than air as air
is more refined than the vegetable or the
mineral. There are those who are now
beginning [139] to tell us that the ether
corresponds to that breath of God which
is spoken of in the Bible. It is the
medium by which men live and move and
breathe, and without which men could not
do any of these things. Consequently, we
see that even on the plane of the purely
physical, the sustenance of life depends
more on the invisible things than on the
visible. When this lesson is learned, as
it is being slowly but surely learned in
almost every department of thought, men
will eat less and live longer.
The day has
gone by when physical life is to be
sustained by the quantity of food. It is
even now among the naturopaths and others
a question of quality. We are eating
less; we are enjoying better health, and
there is an increasing longevity on the
part of the race, all because we are
getting away from the idea of the merely
physical and material.
The text
that we have chosen for our discourse is
tremendously interesting: interesting
from the fact that though it has been
accepted by many, it has been ridiculed
by [140] many others. Ridiculed by those
who do not understand its spiritual
significance, it has been accepted with
the same lack of understanding, just as
unquestionably as the man who accepts the
fact that there will be light in a room
if he can touch an electric button.
We have
accepted these great facts in Biblical
literature unquestioningly, and yet back
of them all, there is a spiritually
scientific import, which, when
understood, will enable us to do in the
degree that we understand it, just what
Enoch did. It is said, “By faith
Enoch was translated that he should not
see death.” By faith! The word
faith has come to have a very
narrow meaning; to most of us, it
represents a sort of blind trust, a
confidence in something that we cannot
understand, an acceptance of something
that we cannot unravel. We think of this
peculiarity of mind as responsible, in
the early days, for the strange
manifestations of men like Elijah, Enoch,
and Jesus--a blind trust in an invisible
force or power; when, as a matter of
fact, the word faith in the
original Hebrew meant knowledge. [141] If
we substitute the word knowledge for
faith, we shall read it in this way: By
knowledge Enoch was translated that he
should not see death.
It is by
knowledge that we are all translated. The
word translate means to change, to be
removed from; by knowledge we are
changed. Our opinions change from day to
day as the result of exact knowledge or
scientific demonstration. We are removed
from our old conceptions every day that
we think. We are taken away from things,
which yesterday we regarded as true, and
transplanted into a new atmosphere.
Through true
knowledge, Enoch arrived at the
conclusion that life was sustained from
above and not from beneath. He realized
that life is far more than the merely
material, infinitely more than the merely
intellectual. He penetrated beneath the
surface of things and reached the very
foundation of what constitutes life. Thus
he saw that life is and always must
be--God. The more he could know about
God, the more he would know about life.
This is why Jesus said, [142] "This is
life eternal, that they might know thee,
the only true God"--the only true
Life.
Regarding
life from the standpoint of the physical,
we never know God, we never know what
life is, and so we are told Enoch was
translated because he had faith or
understanding of a Divine Principle.
In another
part of this wonderful testimony to
eternal life or immortality in the flesh,
we are told that Enoch walked and talked
with God: that is, Enoch lived the
divinely contemplative life; he felt a
sense of nearness to the source of
things. He persuaded himself of the great
fact that his life was God, and the more
fully he became persuaded of this fact,
the more fully he began to live his life,
his spiritual life, his real life,
because, after all, a man has not two
lives. He has not a physical, mortal
life, which begins and ends, and another
spiritual and immortal life, which
neither begins nor ends. This lesson we
must learn sometime, somehow, somewhere;
whether we learn it now in this chamber
of the Father's [143] house, or in the
other after what we call death, does not
make any difference, except that it is
wiser for us to begin here.
We must
learn that life is one, not two; we must
learn what life is, and then we shall
begin to live it: live it fully,
gloriously, profitably, painlessly. The
only sense that most of us have had of
life has been that of mortal existences
sort of coming in at one wing of the
stage and going out at another, a passage
through, but never anything fixed or
permanent. Mortal life has been the only
sense of life we have ever had; because
of this, we have never really received
from life all that life contains for
us.
After all
the only life is the spiritual life and
this holds true, not only after death,
but now. Of course, there are those who
doubt life after death; but most of us
are perfectly willing to admit that
immortality is a fact which will be
proven, which will be demonstrated after
we die.
But this was
not the teaching of Jesus. We are told
that the mission of Jesus was to bring
life and immortality to light. Now [144]
when you bring a thing to light, you make
it manifest. It was to bring immortality
to light, to reveal to humanity the great
fact that immortality is not a
post-mortem experience but a present
possibility, that he came. Jesus had not
added to the world’s knowledge at
all if he merely came to preach
immortality after death. The Pharisees
believed in it, the ancient Egyptians
believed it; the Israelites from time
immemorial had believed in immortal life
after death. What Jesus came for, then,
was to reveal immortality now, to bring
it to light, to make of it a personal
attainment in this day and in this
generation. He demonstrated it. Most of
us, especially in the older churches, are
prone to regard these experiences as
deviations from the natural order of
things, when, as a matter of fact, they
are nothing more nor less than the
external manifestation of an internal
co-operation with the Divine Principle.
They were not strange and unusual
experiences that could never be
demonstrated again. They [145] were the
natural results of men's understanding of
the principle of life and their own
identification with it; and wherever men
have understood the science of life from
a purely spiritual point of view,
infallibly, longevity has been the
result.
To
understand life as purely spiritual here
and now, and to live the life purely
spiritual here and now is to avoid a
great many of the painful consequences
that go with the opposite belief. To
overcome fear is, perhaps, the greatest
necessity today. What a hindrance it is
to our success in life, to the enjoyment
of peace, to happiness and to health!
What a terrible sin fear is! To
stigmatize fear as sin is hardly
consistent with our old teaching, and yet
to those of you who have studied the New
Testament, it must be very apparent that
John the Apostle regarded fear as the
most vicious of all sins. He puts it at
the very head of all sins: "To the
fearful, and unbelieving, and the
abominable, and murderers, and the
sorcerers"; he speaks of these as all
being outside of the kingdom, meaning by
the [146] kingdom, the kingdom of
happiness and joy. The fearful! He headed
the list with these. When we say that
fear is a sin, we speak advisedly,
because it is a lack of trust in that
supreme Life which is God; it is a lack
of faith in one's own divine
possibilities. It brings with it lack of
control over one's emotions, over one's
sensations, over one's affairs. It is
blighting, demoralizing, diseasing, and
death-dealing.
How [to]
overcome it? The one great thing that
enables us to conquer fear is the
realization of what life is, to realize
that life is perpetual, indestructible,
eternal, and forever spiritual; to
realize that nothing can deprive us of
it. Without it we would not be. Life is
the foundation, the superstructure, the
divine reality of each and every
individual; separated from it we cannot
be. When once this great fact dawns upon
the consciousness of the awakened mind,
fear subsides; we know that there is no
death; we know that life is the
unbreakable reality. At first it is
merely an intellectual thing. Then, as we
walk and [147] talk with God, who is
Life, and dwell upon the great facts of
being, it becomes a spiritual possession.
Ills disappear, diseases flee, health
springs forth speedily, strength
increases, and life becomes a joy because
we know now its indestructibility. We
know now that it is not confined to that
period after death or before birth, but
is that which knows no break; not even
human birth nor human death can interfere
with it any more than the putting on of
the lights and turning them off can
interfere with electric energy. You do
not change the unchangeable electric
energy of the universe when you turn on
the lights or turn them off again, when
you run the elevator up or bring it down
again. That is static. Electric energy is
the same, yesterday, today and forever;
all you do with it is to appropriate it
and to stop appropriating it.
All that we
are doing here on this plane of
consciousness is appropriating
life--utilizing it, if you please, and
frequently very poorly. We are here to
utilize life, and we utilize it in very
much the same manner as [148] we utilize
electric energy, we turn it on and we
turn it off again. We enjoy it or we put
it out; we practically do as we please
with it, because we are the individuals
who give direction to that energy which
we call life or the spirit. That is our
function in life. We shut it off through
fear, we enjoy it through courage.
Enoch was
translated. The discouraging feature
about this text is that sometimes we read
it as if it were an instantaneous
experience with Enoch. We read it as if
it were some strange and unusual
proceeding which took place in a night,
when, as a matter of fact, the
translation of Enoch had been going on
from his early youth. By degrees, he had
become better acquainted with life. The
fact that he walked and talked with God
reveals the other fact that he was a
contemplative individual, that he thought
of life from its purely spiritual point
of view and in its purely spiritual
aspect, and because of it life became to
him boundless, unending, most
enjoyable.
Jesus'
resurrection, his ascension, and
restoration [149] of life to Lazarus, and
to the daughter of Jairus, were all
indications of a profound knowledge of
what life is. Jesus knew that the life of
Lazarus was God; he knew that the life of
Jairus' daughter was God; he knew that
his own life was God, and by reason of
his knowledge, he demonstrated his
spiritual life, on what we call a
material plane. He objectified his
knowledge of truth and he said to you and
to me, in that won- derful but somewhat
mystic book of Revelations, "To him that
overcometh will I give to eat of the tree
of life which is in the midst of the
paradise of God."
The book of
Revelations is mystic, but it is not on
this account meaningless. On the
contrary, who has eyes to see may see; he
who has an understanding heart may
unravel the divine mysteries and may find
for himself on these sacred pages the
science by which he may live longer and
more enjoyably. "To him that overcometh
will I give to eat of the tree of life,
which is in the midst of the paradise of
God." Overcometh what? That is the great
question. What are we to overcome? [150]
In the old churches we know that we are
to overcome sin, and by sin we mean those
crude and gross and coarse forms of
licentiousness. We know that we are to
overcome the murderous instinct, the
thieving instinct, the adulterous
instinct; we know that we are to overcome
the lower passions and the lower vices
and viciousness of the carnal mind. But
Jesus meant infinitely more than this. He
knew that even when men overcome these
low animal tendencies, they have not yet
overcome their fear of death. They have
not yet overcome their belief in a life
apart from God. They still believe in a
physical life which can begin and end.
Even though men have overcome all of
these lower instincts, even though men
are what the world would call strictly
moral men, they are nevertheless
unrighteous. That is, they are unright in
their judgment. They have not overcome
their belief in death. Until we overcome
that belief all of our lifetime we shall
be in bondage to the fear of it.
The
righteous man is just as much afraid
[151] of death as the unrighteous man,
except that he has a changed belief
concerning it. He is not nearly so afraid
to meet his God as is the unrighteous
man, but he believes that he can only
meet his God through death. He does not
realize that he may walk and talk with
God on this plane of consciousness. He
believes that death is the necessary
matrix of immortality. He believes that
the experience of death is the only means
by which he may enter into the presence
of that Eternal Life which is God, when,
as a matter of fact, it is totally
inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus,
"That they might know thee, the only true
God; this is life eternal."
Life eternal
consists in spiritual understanding, and
that must begin here. The more we get of
it, the more life we shall have. In
ancient literature, we read something
that is really interesting concerning
this "tree of life which is in the midst
of the paradise of God." Ancient
literature and ancient art picture the
tree of life as having its roots in the
air, apparently attached to nothing, with
its fruit-bearing branches leaning in the
direction of the earth; our picture, the
modern representation of the garden of
paradise, or the garden of Eden,
represents it with its roots in the
earth, with its fruitbearing branches
extending upward. The idea of the older
mysticism was that life is not sustained
by sinking the roots of thought into
materiality; rather is it sustained by
lifting the roots of thought in the
direction of the Holy Spirit into
apparent nothingness, and yet into the
great somethingness of Life; “into
the very womb of ether,” say the
old literateurs, there to conceive grand
ideas which presently bear fruit: fruit
not so much for self-support as for the
support of the race.
The
contemplative soul is that which regards
life from the standpoint of the purely
spiritual, extending the roots of its
thought in the direction of the upper
world, the spiritual world: God, if you
prefer; drawing its sustenance from the
Divine, transmuting into the human,
feeding humanity upon that which it
derives from Divinity. It is a very
pretty picture and not at all hurtful and
injurious. [153] Rather is it explanatory
of a great deal that we now dream about.
We are not so much to be fed upon the
things of earth as we are upon that bread
which cometh down from Heaven. Jesus said
to his disciples: “I have meat to
eat that ye know not of.” His life
was sustained more by Divine
contemplation than by physical exercise
or material food. If we would live the
same life and live well and long and
helpfully to humanity, we must be fed
from the very same source. Our tree of
life must have its roots planted in the
Divine. We must draw our refreshment from
the great Water of Life, which is God,
our sustenance from the meat of the
Spirit.
Then, and
then only, shall we know what life really
is. We shall become translated, changed
from a belief in a necessity of depending
upon matter to the consciousness that
Spirit is the only thing that sustains
and supports. The translation will begin
in a small way; it will go on and on and
on, until we, too, may taste of the
glorious hope and the glorious
achievement of Enoch.
[154] This
seems impossible because so few have done
it in the world's history, but a wise man
once said: "Whatever the human mind can
conceive, the human mind can accomplish."
When Jules Verne conceived the idea of
submarines, only adventurous youths took
any interest in it; when the idea of
navigating the air was conceived, wise
men shook their heads. The theologians
said it was exercising a prerogative
which did not belong to man, invading the
territory which belonged alone to God,
and must eventually fail. It was seeking
to dominate an atmosphere for which man
was not originally intended, which
belonged to the birds. And what do we
see? We see the dream of Jules Verne
actualized---demonstrated in a barbarous
manner, perhaps, but demonstrated. We see
the air dominated, controlled, utilized,
in a way that we would not prefer, but
nevertheless actualized.
Whatever the
human mind can conceive, that it can
accomplish; this has as much reference to
translation and the overcoming of what we
call physical death and to the
demonstration [155] and the bringing to
light of immortality in the flesh as it
has to aviation or submarine warfare. One
is just as possible as the other, the
only reason for its not being more fully
demonstrated is, as Balzac once said: "It
has hitherto lacked its man of genius to
demonstrate it." Balzac seems to have
forgotten Jesus and Enoch and Elijah.
Levitation is as much a possibility as
aviation. The only reason why it is not
more generally accomplished is because it
is not more generally studied.
Translation is a possibility. To the
vulgar mind, of course, it is not. Why
should it be? Has any great
accomplishment ever been possible to the
vulgar mind? But to the awakened
consciousness, it is a demonstrable
possibility.
We are
living in an age when we are beginning to
say, even in the world of physical
science, "I do not believe anything is
impossible." Why? Because we have seen so
many things demonstrated before our very
eyes. He is, indeed, an incredulous man
who would suggest that anything is
impossible.
[156] So
many marvelous things have transpired in
the last twenty-five years, that we are
ready for anything on a purely physical
plane. We dominate all earth, water, sky,
sea. All things are possible to the man
who believes they are possible. Enoch
believed translation was possible; he
believed that he would not see death if
he became more intelligently acquainted
with life. He demonstrated it. I am quite
prepared to believe it, because I have
seen this same law in part demonstrated.
I have seen impending death frustrated. I
have seen life lengthened by the
dissipation of fear.
Therefore,
if you can totally overcome fear, you can
overcome death, because death is produced
by fear. Physicians agree with us in
this. Jesus knew that it was the
predisposing cause. He knew that if he
could destroy the fear of death he could
destroy death itself; we know today in
Divine Science, if we can destroy the
fear of disease, of poverty, and of pain,
we can destroy this trinity of evils. We
know it because we know that fear is the
mother seed. We [157] know that fear is
the procuring cause of these mental and
physical maladies. Destroy it and they
disappear.
What is the
antidote for fear? A knowledge of the
truth. Jesus said: "Ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you
free." If you know the truth about
anything you are free from the tendency
to err. If you know the truth about life,
you are free from the tendency to be
afraid of death; if you are not afraid of
death, you will neither invite nor
attract it. Fear does both. Fear is the
magnet which attracts poverty, pain,
disease, death. To overcome fear, we must
know the truth, and we must know the
truth about life.
What is
life? Is it material or spiritual? Has it
beginning and ending, or is it immortal?
Is it that which we cannot see, or that
which we do see? What is life, after all?
Life is the unseen verity of every man's
being. It is the invisible Reality and
Substance, from which he can never become
separated, even though he put off his
mortal body. Live he must; there is no
such thing [158] as death. Somewhere,
somehow, he must live, because he is a
part of Life itself. When this becomes
more intelligently understood, we shall
lose our fear, and the consequence will
be a fuller life, the life more abundant,
the life more pleasurable, the life more
enjoyable.
The fact
that it is a spiritual life and does not
tend to cause thought to gravitate in the
direction of matter, or materiality, or
sensuality, does not change the fact of
its enjoyableness. He who lives most is
he who lives best; he who gets most out
of life is he who understands what life
is, and understanding what life is, knows
it to be purely spiritual. He walks, he
talks with the Spirit, and God takes him:
that is, Life absorbs him, Life enfolds
him, Life encompasses him, Life breathes
through him. He is an instrument through
which Life manifests itself. The fear of
death never comes to him who knows what
Life is; he knows that all experiences
are so many links in the great
indestructible, unbreakable chain. To
live is a delight to the man who knows
what [159] life is: not going to be but
is this very moment. Threats,
intimidations, have no weight. He feels
the consciousness of a Divine Presence,
he knows that his life is indestructible
and eternal now; this gives him courage
to live it beautifully, cheerfully,
happily. Nothing can hinder such a man
from entering into the larger, fuller
appreciation of his own divine
possibilities.
Then let us
study life from the purely spiritual
point of view. Let us realize that it is
that which is unseen, that which we carry
about with us, that from which we can
never become separated: "Neither height
nor depth, nor length, nor breadth, nor
things present nor things to come, can
separate us from the love which is in
Christ Jesus," the life which is
spiritual.
This was the
dictum of Paul, the Apostle, who said:
"We shall not all sleep"--that is, we
shall not all die, but in the twinkling
of an eye we shall awake; we shall put on
immortality now; we shall become
translated.
This is what
you are doing in your bodies. You are
putting off mortality and putting [160]
on immortality while you breathe. You are
casting off old cells and growing new
ones, by a perfectly unconscious process
to yourselves. Why not surcharge every
new cell with the thought of eternal
life, with the thought of indestructible
immortality? Why not think of life as a
purely spiritual thing so that each cell,
as it takes the place of the old cell,
shall come to perform its function
harmoniously and perfectly, strong and
vigorous, until it gives place to a newer
and higher and better cell?
This is
immortality: the replenishing of the
human body by the transformation of the
human thought; the renewing of the mind
at the fount of thought; having the roots
of thought in the direction of the
Spirit; bearing the fruits of that
contemplated life in health and strength
and joy and power, abundant here and
now.
Purely
spiritual, never material; purely
immortal, never mortal; purely infinite
and inexhaustible, never finite and
exhaustible; increasing your energy, your
vitality, your power: this is Life!
Chapter
7
* * * * *
New Thoughts on Old
Doctrines
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
