CONTINUITY, which is the state of being continuous, characterizes the life and individuality of man and of all reality. This is so because the one real cause, Mind, Spirit, God, is continuous and it is in Mind's manifestation that the continuity of God is individualized and made evident.
Mary Baker Eddy says, "Spirit is the life, substance, and continuity of all things" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 124). Spirit, Mind, is the only real life of you and me, the only real substance of each of us, and the continuity of all of us. The uninterruptibleness of our life and consciousness is as sure as is God's continuance, which man must ever express.
Mortals, for the most part, have long believed that life is not stopped by death. They have had an innate feeling that in some way the continuance of life is provided for by forces they did not understand. In some museums one sees the food and clothes that were placed in the tombs of Egypt's kings and queens thousands of years ago with the intent to supply their immediate human needs in the hereafter.
The material sense of life gives no evidence of the continuity of individual being. Matter evolves its material forms of life, destroys them, and evolves some more, so presenting a repetition of the cycle of finite life, but never an unbroken continuity of individual existence. Once accept the material sense of life and selfhood as real, and you join the fictitious coming and going procession of mortality.
But if we reason logically from the basis of eternal Mind as the only cause and see something of the truth that man is Mind's individual expression, reflecting the substance of Mind and not matter, we begin to see that our continuity is forever unbroken because our oneness with ever continuing Mind is unbreakable.
The Psalmist recognized this never-to-be-broken continuity of life when he wrote, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me" (Ps. 23:4). The reason why he feared no evil was "for thou art with me," regardless of what material thought and sense say is happening to the material misconception of man. What error claims is taking place in the suppositional realm of mortality, wherein mortals are being born, maturing, and dying with all sorts of human adventures in between, never supplants the unbreakable continuity of spiritual Life, which man ever embodies and manifests in the environment of Mind's infinite kingdom. The mortal and suppositional never endangers or becomes substituted for the spiritual and actual.
In that most revealing seventeenth chapter of John, Christ Jesus talks intimately and naturally to the Father of his work, its consummation, his disciples, the world and its overcoming. He explains the continuity of life as inherent in the individual's knowing God and His Christ. He says, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." Then he later concludes, "I have declared unto them thy name . . . that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:3, 26).
Jesus realized so fully God's continuing love for His son that the world of loveless matter was powerless to encroach upon his sense of life as forever of and in God, naturally possessing, as God's reflection, the Father's unchallengeable continuity. Let us be sure we are growing into a sense of the naturalness of endless, continuous being, realizing it is the result of God's never-waning love for His own expression.
We must be sure our sense of "I" and "us" is not the worldly, fleshly sense. What matter says we are, we are not. What matter says it is doing to us, it is not doing. What matter, or mortal mind, says it may do to us tomorrow, or ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or sixty years from now, it can never do. Every statement and suggestion of matter proceeds from the false premise that life is not of Spirit, Mind, God, but is of and in unspiritual, mindless, and godless matter; that we are mortals, whose life is subject to affliction and death from material forces.
But the revelation of Christian Science says: "Life and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of existence into loveliness, freshness, and continuity, rather than into age and blight" (Science and Health p. 246). Are we doing this? Are we daily shaping "our views of existence into loveliness, freshness, and continuity"? We can do so only as we repudiate the material, mortal, selfish, willful, fearful sense of self and daily and hourly let the Christ-idea of God as eternal Life, infinite Love, and man as His son, expressing the unending freshness of Mind's ever-appearing ideas, be reality to us.
Life has never been mortalized; therefore mortal personality does not represent Life. The continuity of God and man has forever been, and is now, for you and me to understand and manifest. Our views of existence must be shaped to coincide with the loveliness of deific Love, the freshness of ever-unfolding Mind, and the continuity of unceasing Life. This is reality.
The ego man is forever spiritual, God's eternal reflection now. Do not think or say, "I am a mortal expecting sometime to die." That is not you but error talking. Know what God, your only Mind, causes you to know. You are only what God makes you to be and knows you are. Forever you are caused, conditioned, and controlled by God alone. Never has your individuality been born of, embodied in, nor can it ever be affected or destroyed by material forces. Your life is of and in God and expresses the love, health, and continuity of the Supreme Being.
