February 4, 2015
Hymns 186,391,412
The Bible:
Ps 39:5 mine (to 1st :)
mine age is as nothing before thee:
Ps. 90:9 we
we spend our years as a tale that is told.
Ps 16:11
Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
Ps 36:9
For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.
Job 11:17 thine; 12:12, 13
thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning.
With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding. With him is wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and understanding.
Isa. 40:31 1st they
they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
Gen. 5:21-23 Enoch
Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:
Gen. 47:28
And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years: so the whole age of Jacob was an hundred forty and seven years.
Deut. 34:7 Moses
Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.
Ps. 92:13, 14 (to 1st ;)
Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age;
Col 3:9 seeing, 10
seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:
Rev 21:5
And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
Science and Health:
402:8-13
The time approaches when mortal mind will forsake its corporeal, structural, and material basis, when immortal Mind and its formations will be apprehended in Science, and material beliefs will not interfere with spiritual facts. Man is indestructible and eternal.
261:8-30
The effect of mortal mind on health and happiness is seen in this: If one turns away from the body with such absorbed interest as to forget it, the body experiences no pain. Under the strong impulse of a desire to perform his part, a noted actor was accustomed night after night to go upon the stage and sustain his appointed task, walking about as actively as the youngest member of the company. This old man was so lame that he hobbled every day to the theatre, and sat aching in his chair till his cue was spoken, — a signal which made him as oblivious of physical infirmity as if he had inhaled chloroform, though he was in the full possession of his so-called senses.
Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.
243:16, 30-32 (np)
The clay cannot reply to the potter. The head, heart, lungs, and limbs do not inform us that they are dizzy, diseased, consumptive, or lame. If this information is conveyed, mortal mind conveys it. Neither immortal and unerring Mind nor matter, the inanimate substratum of mortal mind, can carry on such telegraphy; for God is “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” and matter has neither intelligence nor sensation.
Sickness, sin, and death are not the fruits of Life. They are inharmonies which Truth destroys. Perfection does not animate imperfection. Inasmuch as God is good and the fount of all being, He does not produce moral or physical deformity; therefore such deformity is not real, but is illusion, the mirage of error. Divine Science reveals these grand facts. On their basis Jesus demonstrated Life, never fearing nor obeying error in any form.
If we were to derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness would have no abiding-place in man, and the worms would rob him of the flesh; but Paul writes: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”
Man undergoing birth, maturity, and decay is like the beasts and vegetables, — subject to laws of decay. If man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but man was never more nor less than man.
If man flickers out in death or springs from matter into being, there must be an instant when God is without His entire manifestation, — when there is no full reflection of the infinite Mind.
Man in Science is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor death. He is not a beast, a vegetable, nor a migratory mind. He does not pass from matter to Mind, from the mortal to the immortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions cast us headlong into darkness and dogma. Even Shakespeare’s poetry pictures age as infancy, as helplessness and decadence, instead of assigning to man the everlasting grandeur and immortality of development, power, and prestige.
214:28-30, 32-10
Neither age nor accident can interfere with the senses of Soul, and there are no other real senses. … Spirit’s senses are without pain, and they are forever at peace. Nothing can hide from them the harmony of all things and the might and permanence of Truth.
If Spirit, Soul, could sin or be lost, then being and immortality would be lost, together with all the faculties of Mind; but being cannot be lost while God exists. Soul and matter are at variance from the very necessity of their opposite natures. Mortals are unacquainted with the reality of existence, because matter and mortality do not reflect the facts of Spirit.
245:1-31
The error of thinking that we are growing old, and the benefits of destroying that illusion, are illustrated in a sketch from the history of an English woman, published in the London medical magazine called The Lancet.
Disappointed in love in her early years, she became insane and lost all account of time. Believing that she was still living in the same hour which parted her from her lover, taking no note of years, she stood daily before the window watching for her lover’s coming. In this mental state she remained young. Having no consciousness of time, she literally grew no older. Some American travellers saw her when she was seventy-four, and supposed her to be a young woman. She had no care-lined face, no wrinkles nor gray hair, but youth sat gently on cheek and brow. Asked to guess her age, those unacquainted with her history conjectured that she must be under twenty.
This instance of youth preserved furnishes a useful hint, upon which a Franklin might work with more certainty than when he coaxed the enamoured lightning from the clouds. Years had not made her old, because she had taken no cognizance of passing time nor thought of herself as growing old. The bodily results of her belief that she was young manifested the influence of such a belief. She could not age while believing herself young, for the mental state governed the physical.
Impossibilities never occur. 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.
249:5-8
Let the “male and female” of God’s creating appear. Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life and recognizing no mortal nor material power as able to destroy.
245:32-31
The infinite never began nor will it ever end. Mind and its formations can never be annihilated. Man is not a pendulum, swinging between evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death. Life and its faculties are not measured by calendars. The perfect and immortal are the eternal likeness of their Maker. Man is by no means a material germ rising from the imperfect and endeavoring to reach Spirit above his origin. The stream rises no higher than its source.
The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. As the physical and material, the transient sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with bright and imperishable glories.
Never record ages. Chronological data are no part of the vast forever. Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood. Except for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, man would enjoy more than threescore years and ten and still maintain his vigor, freshness, and promise. Man, governed by immortal Mind, is always beautiful and grand. Each succeeding year unfolds wisdom, beauty, and holiness.
Life is eternal. We should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof. Life and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of existence into loveliness, freshness, and continuity, rather than into age and blight.
162:13-19
The indestructible faculties of Spirit exist without the conditions of matter and also without the false beliefs of a so-called material existence. Working out the rules of Science in practice, the author has restored health in cases of both acute and chronic disease in their severest forms.
247:3-18
I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A woman of eighty-five, whom I knew, had a return of sight. Another woman at ninety had new teeth, incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. One man at sixty had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth without a decaying cavity.
Beauty, as well as truth, is eternal; but the beauty of material things passes away, fading and fleeting as mortal belief. Custom, education, and fashion form the transient standards of mortals. Immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a glory of its own, — the radiance of Soul. Immortal men and women are models of spiritual sense, drawn by perfect Mind and reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness which transcend all material sense.
248:5
Men and women of riper years and larger lessons ought to ripen into health and immortality, instead of lapsing into darkness or gloom. Immortal Mind feeds the body with supernal freshness and fairness, supplying it with beautiful images of thought and destroying the woes of sense which each day brings to a nearer tomb.
248:12-4
The sculptor turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model? Are you reproducing it? Then you are haunted in your work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms. Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your life-work, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models.
To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love — the kingdom of heaven — reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear.
Let us accept Science, relinquish all theories based on sense-testimony, give up imperfect models and illusive ideals; and so let us have one God, one Mind, and that one perfect, producing His own models of excellence.
249:18-20 (to 1st .)
Life is, like Christ, “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.” Organization and time have nothing to do with Life.
393:10-13, 16-21
Exercise this God-given authority. Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good.
Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs, and that in Science man reflects God’s government. Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation.
214:28
Neither age nor accident can interfere with the senses of Soul, and there are no other real senses. It is evident that the body as matter has no sensation of its own, and there is no oblivion for Soul and its faculties. Spirit’s senses are without pain, and they are forever at peace. Nothing can hide from them the harmony of all things and the might and permanence of Truth.
261:21-1, 7-8
Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.
We should forget our bodies in remembering good and the human race. Good demands of man every hour, in which to work out the problem of being. By putting “off the old man with his deeds,” mortals “put on immortality.”
66:14
Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love.