One might ask if it is possible for a student of Christian Science to remain youthful, mentally and physically, during all his earthly pilgrimage. Science answers that undeclining vigor and freshness are not only possible but spiritually normal and that therefore we should prove them at every stage. This Science shows that it is as essential to overcome the belief of age and decrepitude as the belief of disease, sin, and death. Advancing age is a false belief. Admitting this belief as real reproduces it in our lives, and that, along with the accumulation of problems left unsolved, is all there is to aging. Aging has actually nothing to do with years. Through progressive demonstration we shall learn that there is no mysterious power called time influencing our lives. Time is only mortal thought.

In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy relates an incident, published in a London medical magazine, of a young woman who lost all sense of passing years and every day stood at a window watching for her lover's coming. She believed that that moment of time never changed. Consequently she manifested no change in mind or body. After reaching the age of seventy-four she appeared to be under twenty. Mrs. Eddy writes: "Years had not made her old, because she had taken no cognizance of passing time nor thought ofherself as growing old. The bodily results of her belief that she was young manifested the influence of such a belief." ^{Science and Health, p. 245;}

This incident proves that aging has a mental, not a physical, cause. And Christian Science shows how, through spiritual understanding, we may begin to annul this false mental cause and so destroy the baneful influence ascribed to time. The mere passage of this earth around the sun can have no aging effect on us unless we believe in solar years. In Science there is no divine law imposing deterioration and decay. As we realize the omnipresence of Mind, Spirit, God, we shall now be living, not in a past or a future but in a spiritual sense of being that can never grow old.

Mrs. Eddy declares in the Preface to Miscellaneous Writings, "Truly may it be said: There is an old age of the heart, and a youth that never grows old." ^{Mis., p. ix;} Then she reminds us, "The fleeting freshness of youth, however, is not the evergreen of Soul."

Each one of us can declare and begin to prove in the light of Christian Science that he is ageless, born of God, and that he has no other self.

But one may ask, "Am I not partly mortal, and do not mortals grow old?" Here is a common misconception that would block all progress in this Science. The Scriptures state that God made all and that it was very good. Therefore He did not make mortality or mortals. Hence the belief that we are actually or partly mortals now working out of mortality is a false belief. It is from this belief that we must awaken to find that we are now the perfect spiritual ideas of God, ageless, diseaseless, sinless, and deathless, bearing no resemblance to mortal man.

Only mortals believe in and experience "the fleeting freshness of youth," as well as the "old age of the heart." These phases of belief do not touch "the evergreen of Soul," the reality of being.

In the sense-dream we see images of the mortal, or carnal, mind called mortal men and women. These sense-images seem to be born, to mature, age, and die. They simulate intelligence and activity. But they are not real. They are only formations of mortal thought, counterfeits of the individual ideas of God. Are we as students of Christian Science continuing to identify ourselves with these images? Or are we acknowledging our true identity as children of God?

The spiritual awakening to the utter worthlessness of the material counterfeit and the priceless beauty of our real selfhood is graphically portrayed by Mrs. Eddy in Retrospection and Introspection where she writes: "Note well the falsity of this mortal self! Behold its vileness, and remember this poverty-stricken 'stranger that is within thy gates.' Cleanse every stain from this wanderer's soiled garments, wipe the dust from his feet and the tears from his eyes, that you may behold the real man, the fellow-saint of a holy household." ^{Ret., p. 86;}

Are we thus discovering our true selfhood and discarding the false? Are we cherishing reality and in tender compassion wiping away the dust that obscures the beautiful, spiritual, and good in us? If so, we shall see in ourselves God's handiwork untainted by the vileness and poverty of mortal thought. Only through the tenderest compassion for ourselves can we feel the overflow of heart that embraces all mankind.

Spiritual sense is the consciousness of the infinity of good here and now, the consciousness of completeness, of God's allness and the consequent perfection of God's manifestation, man and the universe. This consciousness has no time element. It therefore never grows old, and there is no other real consciousness. Hence Jesus' declaration, "The kingdom of God is within you." ^{Luke 17:21;} As we approximate this kingdom or consciousness, we must lose all restrictions or hypnotic beliefs of an existence apart from God.

To be aging is to be believing in matter, sin, and death. Only mortal mind believes in these. The divine substance of Spirit is untouched by false beliefs. Therefore as we identify ourselves with changeless Spirit, God, we awaken out of the belief of change and decay. We experience the ever-unfolding of spiritual ideas into greater usefulness, a fuller and more rewarding sense of living. Christ Jesus lived the Science and art of true holiness, exemplifying the fact that Science reverses the sense-dream. As we follow his example, we shall prove that instead of declining into age and uselessness, man, our true individuality, continually unfolds into the fuller realization of Life eternal.

Speaking of those who had left all for the kingdom of God's sake, Jesus said that they shall "receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting." ^18:30; Into this spiritual world to come we are being born, day by day, into higher and more spiritual consciousness. Of such it is written, "They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." ^{Isa. 40:31.}