To what are termed the material senses, the statement that man is ageless constitutes an absurdity. Man, according to these senses, begins in material birth, continues through infancy and maturity to maximum achievement, and on to the weakness of a second childhood and final oblivion. No sooner is material man counted into the population than the process of counting him out again begins. In rich language, Shakespeare in his play As You Like It describes this doleful cycle in a passage that has been referred to as "The Seven Ages of Man." If, as we read in Psalms, "the days of our years are threescore years and ten," Ps. 90:10; we might ask, in the words of an anonymous epitaph,
It is so soon that I am done for,
I wonder what I was begun for.
We learn in Christian Science that the material man trapped in a time cycle is not real. He is an insubstantial projection of a mind that is as unreal as the pictures it projects. "Human thought," Mrs. Eddy writes, "never projected the least portion of true being." Science and Health, p. 126; Even the greatest longevity illustrates an infringement on infinity. Immortality is not circumscribed. Eternal Life has no limits.
