A word not frequently heard in daily conversation, but one that greatly helps us to appreciate a vitally important quality of God and His man is "immutable." Dictionaries define it as "unchangeable." In her book "Miscellaneous Writings" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 79), "Immortal man is the eternal idea of Truth, that cannot lapse into a mortal belief or error concerning himself and his origin: he cannot get out of the focal distance of infinity." She continues, "If the great cause is perfect, its effect is perfect also; and cause and effect in Science are immutable and immortal."

Cause and effect are immutable. They are unchangeable in quality and character at any time or in any way. This is contradicted by the material senses, for mutability, or change, characterizes all that is material. Physical science discloses that everything material is in a state of continuous change, chemically or otherwise. As the philosopher, Heraclitus, observed, "There is nothing permanent except change." Sometimes it is rapid, sometimes slow, and sometimes very slow. But still there is change. The term "immutable" is inapplicable to the material creation or to mortal man.

From birth and before, a mortal is ever changing until the change called death. So with animal, tree, and flower. From beginning to end these are constantly in a process of change. For a time there is growth and upbuilding; then come decadence, depletion, and destruction. The human race plans its life on the basis of the generally accepted belief that existence is continuously subject to change. This material view believes one may be healthy one hour, sick the next, alive today, gone tomorrow. It avers that mortals may have normal sight and hearing for a time; then may come a change. A mortal may succeed, then fail, be happy and wholesome, then unhappy and sin-enslaved. One's safety is believed subject to accident, his business to cycles of change and depression.

Christian Science brings to light the fact that all that is real is immutable, stable, unchangeable in nature. God, eternal Mind, is Mind forever. Mind naturally sustains itself and the universe of ideas and identities which are its only manifestation. So-called mortal mind, the basic source of all things material, being finite and negative, does not have the wherewithal to maintain for long the seeming power and intactness of its concepts; hence their mutability and changeableness. Immortal Mind, on the contrary, possessing eternally all power, force, and law, constantly endows its identities with its own immutability.

The individual finds real comfort, assurance, security, and peace as he increasingly understands that his selfhood is not of or in mutable, changeable matter, or subject to the vicissitudes and uncertainties of a material order of existence. The reason: because the cause of man is Spirit, Mind, which never changes, and man, the effect of Mind, its idea, is ever evidencing his cause and its immutability. Man, as divine Mind's idea or manifestation, is subject to no other cause, for no other cause is.

Daily the student of Christian Science should realize the immutability of his God-given manhood, the unalterability of his spiritual nature, the invariableness of his Truth-expressing identity. For him there are no clouds of uncertainty to hide the light of Love permeating the consciousness of every idea of Mind, assuring to it life that cannot, and does not, change to death, health that cannot be turned into sickness, sight and hearing that no material belief can impair, morality and godliness that nothing can corrupt or adulterate.

Like the eternal I am, man's substance is immutable, unchangeable. Within his Mind-constituted being is no element, force, or factor that can produce change, alteration, or dissolution. There is nought that can attack his individuality from without or within. Only God is without, even as He only is within, for God is All-in-all—the only cause expressed in and by all effect.

Man, because he is spiritual, Godlike, and therefore immutable, can never be affected by any material belief or force claiming to deplete, change, or destroy mentally, physically, or morally. His individuality in its entirety is eternally immutable as God's own image, beyond the touch of any evil suggestion or altering belief. Because man is spiritually substantial, he is eternally immutable. He has God's righteousness, Mind's intelligence, Soul's substance, Truth's reality, Life's eternity, Principle's immutability.

As we realize something of the immutable, unchangeable nature of God, creation, and man, important changes result in our human experience. Fear goes. What men fear is the possibility of change detrimental to their health and happiness. The realization of the immutability of man living in, by, and for the immutable One leaves nothing for fear to feed upon.

Christ Jesus healed the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the paralyzed, the cripples, the lepers, and raised Lazarus after he had been four days in the tomb, all through his understanding of the immutable nature of man as the spiritual, changeless, perfect expression of the Life that is God. His understanding of this verity compelled mutable mortal mind to give up its lying claim to have created man a mortal, embodied him in ignorant matter, and subjected him to afflictive change.

With ever-increasing faith in the immutability of God, let us claim for ourselves the health, holiness, deathlessness, and unchangeableness that belong to immutable man every moment, in time and eternity. With the Word of God, let us be removing "those things that are shaken ... that those things which cannot be shaken may remain" (Hebr. 12:27).

Paul Stark Seeley