At noon the sun appears to shine with greatest warmth and brilliance. Shadows shorten or disappear. But presently the sun descends in the sky. Its warmth and light appear to fade, the shadows return, and night comes as the sun disappears beyond the horizon. In actuality, however, the sun is always at the fullness of noontime brilliance and warmth; it has not moved or changed, ascended or descended, but remains invariable.

How symbolic the sun is of the glorious, unchanging nature of God! In his Epistle, James referred to God as "the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (1:17), and John declared (I John 1: 5), "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

If God in His allness is ever-radiant light, the source of invariable, ever-present good, then it logically follows in Christian Science that man, His image and likeness, must dwell in and be the perfect expression of the unchanging, unending goodness which is God. The Apostle Paul positively identified man thus (I Thess. 5:5): "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness."Here are revealed the eternal facts of Life and all the glorious possibilities of man —his agelessness, deathlessness, timelessness.

But what of the dreary limitations, the utter frustrations, the shocking finalities, which seem so inescapably a part of precarious mortal existence? Must we not positively and scientifically conclude that they are the shades and shadows of an unreal world and an unreal man—misconceptions of life, ignorance of God and of man as His reflection?

"The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun." So writes Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health (p. 246). One of the most deeply entrenched fallacies concerning man's life is that it begins and ends and that between apparent incipiency and demise is a period of ascending to maturity and a period of descending to finality. But manhood is the eternal noon of being: there is noontime fullness, noontime maturity, noontime perfection, "undimmed by a declining sun."

As God never changes from the absolute perfection of His own being, neither does man, His image and likeness, change. God never grows up or grows old. Neither does man. There are no ascending or descending years for man. God knows no past, no future—only the eternal now. The only time there is for man is the now of God's presence. The shadowy past and the illusory future are unreal areas in the activity of a suppositional consciousness: they do not really exist. Then why need we any longer cling to or regret the one and wish for or fear the other?

It is important for us to know that we are not growing old but it is equally necessary for us to know that we are not staying young. The fact is that "man in Science is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor death" (ibid., p. 244).

The youth we would retain is not a condition of matter but of Mind. It is a childlike spontaneity of thought, a healthful exuberance, an inner joy, a flexibility of spirit, an expectancy of and confidence in good. Such mental attitudes, consistently entertained and daily made our own, are capable of routing out and destroying all the physical ailments, the rigidities and disabilities, normally attributed to advancing years.

Erroneous modes of thinking may sometimes become so much our second nature that it is not easy for us to detect habitually faulty thought patterns. Our conversation, however, often betrays and reveals unmistakably the concepts we hold of life. Such expressions as "the first half of my life," "the middle years," "the rest of my life," or "that's life" show that we have unequivocally pigeonholed ourselves as mortal and unwittingly yielded up our heritage of eternal Life.

To think of life as just beginning for someone, as half over for somebody else, or as almost finished for ourselves is to conform unresistingly to the mortal mode and thereby suffer the unhappy consequences. But if we are alert to adhere to the truth of Life, we shall refuse to believe that life either begins or ends, and thus we shall be able to demonstrate ageless and deathless being. According to Science, the life of man has no infancy, youth, middle years, or senior years. Man has no life of his own. Me reflects the one indivisible Life, which is God.

The shadow of a man is not the man. The shadow has no life, no substance, no real being. The substance of man is not in the shadow. The appearance of a material mortal, made of matter —flesh, blood, and bones—is only a shadow, which disappears when the light of Truth dawns in human consciousness. Right where the shadow appears to be, there is the real man, the divine idea of God, the reflection of Spirit. When Enoch perceived his true identity and substance to be spiritual not material, he walked with God, and it is written of him that he "was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him" (Hebr. 11:5).

Moses learned to refuse to believe in an insurmountable obstacle, a hopeless situation, or an unyielding evil. As he trusted God's direction, none of these illusions took him in. He loved and obeyed only one God, "the Father of lights." He talked with God frequently. On the mountaintop he so perceived the true nature of God and became so consciously aware of his own true selfhood that when he came down from the mount his countenance shone, for he had talked with God face to face and had beheld himself as God's own image, a child of the light.

The transfiguration of Jesus was a sweet prelude of things to come—of his resurrection, victory over death, and ascension. On the mountaintop with his disciples he became so at one with "the Father of lights" that "his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light" (Matt. 17:2). At this point he so understood the agelessness and deathlessness of man that he saw and talked with Moses and Elias, who presumably had been gone for hundreds of years. What more conclusive proof did he need of the eternality of life in order to face the crucifixion with the confidence of knowing death's nothingness and Life's allness and ever-presence?

In "Unity of Good," Mrs. Eddy writes these wonderful truths (p. 61):

"Coming and going belong to mortal consciousness. God is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever."

"To material sense, Jesus first appeared as a helpless human babe; but to immortal and spiritual vision he was one with the Father, even the eternal idea of God, that was—and is—neither young nor old, neither dead nor risen. The mutations of mortal sense are the evening and the morning of human thought,—the twilight and dawn of earthly vision, which precedeth the nightless radiance of divine Life."