CONSTANCY, according to Webster, means, in its primary sense, "a standing firm; hence, applied to God and His works; immutability; unalterable continuance; a permanent state." No one who admits the existence of God and the universe as created by Him, can fail to be struck by the application of this definition to man, who as part of God's "works" is in a condition of "immutability; unalterable continuance; a permanent state." But what man is this that never alters or changes? Every other religious belief but Christian Science would define man as a soul or mind, existing in or connected with a material body; and yet a very little thought suffices to show that this man is certainly not the one that would fit the above definition of constancy. It will perhaps be of advantage to examine this ordinarily accepted view of man rather more closely to see how far, if at all, it fills the high ideal of one of God's "works" as defined above.
The common belief concerning man's existence is that he is conceived materially, is born, passes through a period of growth to a maximum, remains at this maximum for some time, then begins to decay, and that this decay ends finally in a state called death. Even this, however, is the ideal according to mortal belief, and not many are able to attain to it, because the belief of death may intervene at any moment after birth, and prevent the completion of the supposedly normal period of man's existence.
Now, from the moment of conception to the moment of death there is not one thought of constancy present in or connected with this mortal; nay, rather does his very existence depend utterly and entirely on his changing every moment—he can indeed only be conceived of on a basis of inconstancy. The embryo, during the period from conception to birth, passes through many changes as a whole, and it is during this period that mortal man is supposed to demonstrate his relationship, on the Darwinian theory of evolution, to the lower gradations of animal life, in that he passes through phases of existence which are comparable to those of the animals he is supposed to be related to. These embryonic changes therefore reflect the belief that during the time the individual is passing through the first part of his material life, he recalls by these changes the history of the gradual evolutionary transformation during countless ages of the genus man from the simplest form of life to what he is today; and also, by a logical process of reasoning, that this transformation is still going on, so that the material man of a hundred thousand years hence will not be the same sort of man we know today.
