ged. There
is no permanent relationship between the man and the physical matter
which he uses for his vehicle of consciousness. According to the
physiologists every atom of the body changes within a period of a few
years. The cells wear out, break down and pass away to be replaced by
new matter. Not a particle of the physical matter that was in our bodies
seven years ago is there now, and none that is there now will remain.
Within seven years, or less, we shall have bodies composed of new matter
as certainly as an infant's is.

Of course such reconstruction of the body does not change its
appearance. It is built on the same lines. It is as it would be with
some very old cathedral. As the centuries pass it must be slowly
rebuilt. The floors wear out and are relaid. The roof serves its time
and is replaced. The walls crumble first in one place and then another
until they have been completely reconstructed. After a thousand years
has passed there may be none of the original material in the building,
yet its appearance is unchanged. The bodies we have today shall have
passed away and will be growing in the trees and blooming in the flowers
in a few years. The bodies we shall then have are now scattered through
the world. They will be brought together during that time and will come
from many parts of the earth.

The physical senses continually deceive us and nowhere more than in our
ideas about the physical body. It is an unstable mass of matter, in
constant motion, with great gulfs of space between its atoms. Emerson
was very far ahead of his time and it took science a half century to
catch up with him and learn that he had recorded a fact in nature when
he wrote:

Atom from atom yawns as far
As earth from moon, or star from star.

In 1908 the _Scientific American Supplement_, commenting on our
reconstructed ideas about matter, remarked that the actual mass of the
physical body to the apparent mass was about one to one million!

If the physical body is merely an organized mass of matter, continually
varying, constantly coming and going, and having no permanent
relationship to the consciousness that functions through it, what reason
is there for believing that it is the man? Does it seem strange that the
center of consciousness should be able to draw about itself on the
higher planes aggregations of matter and finally to express itself on
the material plane through the mass of matter we call the body? If th