"Can there be any birth or death for man, the spiritual image and likeness of God?" Mary Baker Eddy asks this question on page 206 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." The belief of age, including birth, growth, maturity, and decline, rests on a false material concept of man. The understanding of man's true status replaces this false concept with proof of man's unchanging spiritual birthright. Christian Science gives us this understanding. It teaches us that the years do not bring changes or increase age; only false belief, which is subject to correction, does this. We learn through Science that man is indeed the image and likeness of God, ageless and immortal; and we learn that by accepting and living this truth, we can prove it in our daily lives.

Christ Jesus realized eternal life. He said (John 8:58), "Before Abraham was, I am," and he proved man's eternality visibly to Peter, James, and John. The Bible relates that he was transfigured before them. We read also (Matt. 17:3), "There appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him." Jesus was our Way-shower. He knew God as the Life of man; therefore he knew man as the very expression of eternal Life. He knew the grandeur of man, the newness of man in the likeness of God, and he knew that any appearance of mortality was completely deceptive. He brought forth proof that man reflects or shows forth the ageless being of God.

In our day-by-day human experience, until we begin to awake to the Christly sense of man that Jesus gave us, we often allow ourselves to be fooled by material thinking. We believe in the process of growing from childhood to manhood and then from manhood declining toward death, and we believe that each birthday adds another year toward this end.

Christian Science shows us that in estimating what is real, our task is to separate material beliefs from spiritual facts. We must establish in our thinking the spiritual fact that God is All-in-all, always present, and that man is His perfect reflection. We see that our prayer, as well as our work in Christian Science, is primarily to awaken to man's real selfhood in God. Our recognition of God's presence and our acceptance of and trust in the truth of being bring healing and release from every ill, including the handicaps of age; because the quality of our thinking determines our outward human experience, and spiritual thinking has behind it the power of God.

In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says (p. 244), "Man in Science is neither young nor old." On the next page she tells of a woman who, disappointed in love at an early age, became insane and did not notice the passing years. When she was seventy-four, some travelers who saw her believed that she was still a young woman. Mrs. Eddy adds, "One instance like the foregoing proves it possible to be young at seventy-four; and the primary of that illustration makes it plain that decrepitude is not according to law, nor is it a necessity of nature, but an illusion."

A member of my family had a wonderful proof of God's power over the belief of age. He was employed by a large corporation, and although he was a valuable worker, about eight years ago he had to conform to the company's rule and retire. He had no special interest apart from his work; this meant that he was soon doing nothing and was manifesting all the common symptoms of age. He seemed to be in a daze; he could not think clearly or remember. Sometimes he would lose consciousness.

Through treatment in Christian Science he was healed and went to work in a new position. Today his thought is clear and free, and he is in good health. He reads the Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly every morning before he goes to work and acknowledges that he is in reality God's perfect child. He says he has learned to pray by thanking God for all good; whereas in the past he would plead with God and ask Him for things he thought he should have. He has learned in Christian Science that God gives us what we need, because man always exists in reality as the perfect reflection or manifestation of God.

Man's real selfhood is ever at one with God, and we claim and prove this selfhood by knowing the truth of man in God's likeness. Since Mrs. Eddy gave Science and Health to the world, longevity has increased. The revelation of God as All-in-all and of man in God's likeness enables one to rely on God with confidence and to trust His guidance in human affairs. In the light of this revelation, we can learn to live one day at a time and to have no doubt that God takes care of our future. We see, indeed, that we have something far more wonderful than a future—we have ageless being. Our work is to view existence from the standpoint of immortality and to bring out daily proofs of the words of the Apostle John in the Bible (I John 3:2), "Beloved, now are we the sons of God."