Article November 15, 1952 Issue

NO IMPOSITION OF AGE

RALPH C. HOLMES

When they realize that they are being imposed upon, people generally act promptly and with vigor to stop these impositions. Yet these same people may supinely submit to the deceptions of oncoming age. A dictionary defines "imposition" as "an excessive, unwarranted, or uncalled-for requirement or burden" and as "a trick or deception." We might add also that age is a robber. Mary Baker Eddy has stated it this way in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 246): "The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun."

Sometimes these growing signs of age are open and apparent. Shall we disregard them with the easy excuse, "Well, there are John and Jane whom we know; they are younger than we are, and we are not nearly so decrepit or ailing"? Shall we console ourselves with the anodyne that these are natural tendencies and that we all have to undergo them? At other times the false claims of age are serpentine and subtle, discernible only through continual watchfulness and prayer for their uncovering and elimination. But whether the advance of age is open or subtle, and whether its pace is as undiscernible as the imperceptible movement of a glacier, we must recognize the signs and annul their claims with the truth of being as taught in Christian Science.

The man of God's creating exists at the standpoint of perfection and immortality. He was never born in the flesh; thus he cannot die out of it. Because this is so, we must be alert to see that every symptom of oncoming age is but evil's lying argument that we are born in a material body, that we are inevitably subject to decadence through the processes of disease and decrepitude, and that the grave is our sure destiny.

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