Newness of life! The Bible promises it and the world longs for it! The picturesque figure of the old Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who thought to find the fountain of perpetual youth on the shores of the New World, is symbolic of humanity's endless search —a search which has not been satisfied because it has been wrongly directed. To material sense, discerning only its own ephemeral sense of substance, everything wears out and ends; life itself is fleeting and futile. But to spiritual sense, the God-endowed sense which apprehends reality, Spirit is substance and permanence, and Spirit is Life.

The promise of Christian Science that Life is forever at the standpoint of fullness and perfection is no Utopian dream but the revelation of a stupendous spiritual fact, a fact which is ever present and ever operative, a fact which not all the evidence before the material senses can gainsay or reverse. "Life is the everlasting I am , the Being who was and is and shall be, whom nothing can erase," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 290 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."

Because Life is God, the one I AM, it is self-existent, self-complete. It derives no sustenance from without, but holds within itself its own immeasurable resources of everything it needs; therefore it can never experience depletion or malnutrition in any form. There is nothing in Life that can fade away or be impoverished, that can lapse into imperfection or decay, that is fettered by pain or succumbs to death. Life is perpetual action, which knows neither stagnation nor stoppage, neither fluctuation nor excess. It is dependent upon no physical functioning, no process, for the maintenance of its purity and soundness, its harmony and health. The vital current of Life inheres in its own pulsating self-existence, and is rich, untainted, uncontaminated, and incorruptible, needing no replenishment by external, artificial means. The Psalmist perceived this, for he wrote, "With thee [God] is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light" (Ps. 36:9). Life has no opposite; it can no more wane or lapse into helplessness and lifelessness than God can cease to be God. Life in its every expression is complete and whole. It lacks not a single element of that which is essential to its completeness. Every expression of Life expresses the fullness of Life in vitality and vigor, in animation and exuberance.

The everlasting I AM, or Life, is infinite individuality, endlessly identifying itself in forms of beauty and comeliness, of grace and agility. But Life is not in its formations; the Ego is not divided into parts. The ideas of its conceiving are not fragmentary or fleeting. Forms of Life are forms of Mind. They never get outside of Mind nor stray beyond the pale of Life. They express the beauty of Soul in conscious glory of being. Neither age nor accident touches Life or the forms which reflect it. Life could no more reflect itself in deformity, age, or blight than God, who is infinite good, could express Himself in evil.

Life is incapable of mortal measurements. Despite the dream or mirage of mortality, Life and all that identifies it is perfect and immortal, unchanged and unchangeable. Nothing in Life expresses immaturity or incompleteness. Nothing is undeveloped or retarded. Nothing is measured by calendar years. Life is irrepressible and indestructible. It does not perpetuate itself through a process of human generation. It has no idiosyncrasies or imperfections to transmit or to conceal. There is no law of penalty in Life, no law of condemnation. The law of Life is the law of Love; the power of Life is the power of Love. "Life is the everlasting I am, the Being who was and is and shall be, whom nothing can erase." This is your Life and mine, the only Life there is; and through Christian Science we experience its beneficence.

Newness of Life, then, means not the renewal of that which has become faded or worn, defective or decrepit, but the demonstration of that which by its very nature remains forever new, because Life is forever renewing itself from the endless resources of its own withinness. The newness of Spirit is not the appearing of something hitherto unknown; its renewal is not the rehabilitation of something worn out, but is its perpetual self-expression at the standpoint of perfection.

Christ Jesus proclaimed the purpose of his mighty mission thus (John 10:10): "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." The abundance of Love which he felt enabled him to impart abundance of life. Nothing was too difficult to be transformed by his abundant sense of Love; nothing was too late to be restored by his transcendent consciousness of Life. Never for one moment was he deceived by the mirage of physical sense. He knew that only what is true about God is true about man, and he proved this fact in the liberation of mankind.

Following closely in his footsteps, the Apostle Paul said (II Cor. 5:16, 17): "Henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

Christian Science enables us to know "no man after the flesh." It demonstrates true identity in God-likeness. In the light of this Science all things are made new—seen in their pristine glory, reflecting the fullness, ever-presence, and continuity of Life. Referring to the revelation of reality, as described in the first chapter of Genesis, Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 520): "The numerals of infinity, called seven days, can never be reckoned according to the calendar of time. These days will appear as mortality disappears, and they will reveal eternity, newness of Life, in which all sense of error forever disappears and thought accepts the divine infinite calculus."