Jesus loved little children because of their freedom from wrong and their receptiveness of right. While age is halting between two opinions, or battling with a belief, youth makes easy and rapid strides toward Truth.
A little girl who had occasionally listened to my explanations, wounded her finger badly. She seemed not to notice it. On being questioned about it she answered ingenuously, “There is no sensation in matter.” Bounding off, with laughing eyes, she added, “Mamma, my finger is not a bit sore.”
It might have been months or years before her parents would have laid aside their drugs, or reached the mental height their little daughter so naturally accepted. The more stubborn beliefs of parents often choke the good seed in the minds of themselves and their offspring. Ignorance, like “the fowls of the air,” snatches away the good seed before it has sprouted.
Loss of identity, through the understanding of Science, is like the loss of the tones of music in their Principle. The great mistake of mortals is to suppose that man is both mortal and immortal, both good and evil.
The vesture of Life is Truth. According to the Bible, the facts of being are commonly misconstrued, for it is written, “They parted my garments among them, and for my vesture did they cast lots.” The Divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency, without seam or rent; but it has been torn, and lots have been cast for its fragments. Mere speculation has appropriated no part of the vesture; but inspiration restores every part to the divine fabric and robe of righteousness.
Man gives neither shape nor comeliness to beauty. Beauty possesses those qualities even before they are perceived by man. Beauty is a thing of Life, that has dwelt forever in the Eternal Mind. Nature reflects the charms of His goodness in form, outline, coloring. Love paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with heaven's gems, and covers the earth with bright and living characters.
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 standard of mortal beauty. Immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a beauty of its own, belonging to Spirit. Immortal man and woman are the models of spiritual sense, pictures of the Mind that is perfect, reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness that exceed all material sense of loveliness.
To have less illusion and more Soul, is the recipe for beauty. To retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body, into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of impersonal bliss, is not to lose one's identity. The embellishments of the person are poor substitutes for the beauty of Spirit, shining resplendent and eternal over age and decay.
The measurement of Life, by solar years, robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The rising sun of virtue and Truth marks the morning of being. Its manhood is the eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. When a personal and material sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with brighter glories.
Love never loses sight of beauty. Its halo rests upon its object. One marvels that a friend can ever seem less than beautiful. Man and woman, of riper years and larger lessons, are growing in beauty and immortality, in stead of lapsing into age and ugliness. Mind constantly feeds the body with supernal freshness and fairness, supplying it with beautiful images of thought, and destroying the errors of sense that each day brings to a nearer tomb.
Man is not a pendulum swinging betwixt evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death. Life and its faculties are unmeasured 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 above his origin to Spirit. The stream rises no higher than its source.
Man is neither young nor old; he has neither birth nor death. He is not an animal, vegetable, or migrating mind, — passing from the mortal to the immortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions leap headlong into darkness and dogma. Shakespeare's poetry pictures infancy and age as helpless and non-intelligent, instead of assigning to them the grandeur and immortality of Mind.
If we derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness can have no abiding-place in him, and the worms will rob him of all. Paul writes, “For the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”
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 lady, published in The London Lancet.
Disappointed in love, in early years, she became insane. She lost all calculation of time. Believing that she still lived in the same hour that parted her from her lover, she took no note of years, but daily stood before the window, watching for his coming. In this mental state she remained young. Having no appearance of age, she literally grew no older. Some American travellers saw her when she was seventy-four, and supposed her a young lady. Not a wrinkle or gray hair appeared, but youth sat gently on cheek and brow. Asked to judge of her age, and being unacquainted with her history, each visitor conjectured that she must be under twenty.
This instance of youth preserved furnishes a useful hint that a Franklin might work upon, with more certainty than when he coaxed the enamored lightning from the clouds. Years had not made her old, simply because she had taken no cognizance of those years, nor said, “I am growing old.” Her belief that she was young proved the results of such a belief on the body. 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 Principle of that proof makes it plain that decrepitude is not a necessity of nature or law, but an illusion that can be avoided.
Never record ages. Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood. But for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, we could enjoy more than threescore years and ten, and yet maintain our vigor, freshness, and promise. We should continue beautiful and grand, if Mind should so decree. Each succeeding year should make us wiser and better, in looks and action.
Life is eternal. We should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof. Beauty and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of Life into loveliness, freshness, and continuity, instead of into age and ugliness. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Acute and chronic beliefs reproduce their own types in the lingering or less stubborn forms of old age, sickness, and sin. The acute belief of age comes on at a remote period, and does not last as long as the chronic belief.
I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A lady of eighty-five, whom I knew, had a return of sight. Another lady, at ninety, had new teeth, — incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. A gentleman, at sixty, had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth, without a decaying cavity.
Man, having birth, maturity, and decay, is like an animal or vegetable, — the animal unfit to live, and the vegetable subject to laws of decadence. If man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but he was never more nor less than man. Rightly says Longfellow's Psalm of Life,
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the Soul.
If man flickers out in death, or springs from nothingness into being, there must be an instant, sometime, when Jehovah is without completeness, when there is no reflection of Mind or Soul.
