ARE we thinking about growing old? Do we believe that we are older today than we were yesterday, or last week, or last year? Then we are entertaining an illusion, and the understanding of man as Christian Science reveals him will destroy that illusion and bring into present human experience an ever-increasing awareness of loveliness, freshness, and continuity of life. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy are these thought-provoking words (p. 245): "The error of thinking that we are growing old, and the benefits of destroying that illusion, are illustrated in a sketch from the history of an English woman, published in the London medical magazine called The Lancet." Mrs. Eddy then proceeds to relate the experience of a woman who at the age of seventy-four was estimated by those unacquainted with her history to be under twenty. Because this woman believed herself to be young, the passage of time had made no impression on her appearance.
Christian Science teaches that man is God's idea, witness, or expression; that he is coexistent with and therefore inseparable from Him. The manifestation, or expression, of God must be and is Godlike. Only that which is true of God is, or can be, true of man. It therefore follows that the Godlike man is eternal, indestructible, changeless, ageless. God is not subject to material laws relating to birth or death, time or space, youth or age, and neither is His reflection, man. God cannot be touched by mortal beliefs of tender or accumulative years, disease, sickness, sorrow, or lack, and neither can man, His image and likeness. God's immediate and eternal presence leaves no room for fearful misconceptions which, whilst we are unmindful of divine Love's guidance and protection, would claim our attention in the guise of the many limitations which mortal mind associates with old, middle, or young age. Nothing ungodlike is real or true; therefore specious, sporadic, or persistent claims to the contrary have neither cause, presence, nor power.
Awakening to the divine facts of existence, recognizing our eternal unity with God as His idea, we can joyously declare with the beloved disciple, "Now are we the sons of God" (I John 3:2). Now are we conscious of our indestructible coexistence with our infinite Father-Mother God. From this standpoint Christian Scientists are annulling the deceptive, degrading, and disheartening claims of mortality. As individuals perceive and affirm their integral, indivisible, and eternal coexistence with God, they outgrow the unlovely garments of mortality and become clothed with the robes of immortality. The ofttimes insistent, but always deceptive, claims which accompany age have no reality, no cause, foundation, or intelligence, no place in the infinite, eternal divine presence, of which man is the full and perfect expression.
