They have
grasped the Life-giving Truth, only they have postponed its operation,
because they have the fixed idea that its present fruition is an absolute
impossibility.
But if we ask the reason for this idea it always comes back to the old
materialistic argument from the experience of past conditions, while the
whole nature of advance is in the opening up of new conditions. And in this
advance the Bible is the pioneer book. Its whole purport is to tell us most
emphatically that death is _not_ the will of God. In the story of Eden God
is represented as warning man of the poisonous nature of the forbidden
fruit, which is incompatible with the idea of death as an essential feature
of man's nature. Then from the point where man has taken the poison all the
rest of the Bible is devoted to telling us how to get rid of it. Christ, it
tells us, was manifested to bring Life and Immortality to light--to abolish
death--to destroy the works of the devil, that is the death-dealing power,
for "he that hath the power of death is the devil." It is impossible to
reconcile this life-giving conception of the Bible with the idea that death
at any stage or in any degree is the desire of God. Let us, therefore,
start with the recognition that this negative force, whether in its minor
degrees as disease or in its culmination as death, is that which it is the
will of God to abolish.
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