At the age of fifty-six, on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy contracted a new marriage, this time with Mr. Asa G. Eddy, giving her age as forty, as shown by her marriage licence. With a gesture Mrs. Eddy swept aside the charge that she had suppressed the truth about her age, and justified the misrepresentation on metaphysical grounds. In her _Science and Health_, pp. 245-6, she asserts that a woman could not age while believing herself to be young. Eternity, according to her, has nothing to do with chronology, and "time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood." "Never record ages," she advises. But if it makes no difference to a Christian Scientist how old or how young she is, so far as the number of years is concerned, why did Mrs. Eddy under-state her age? In pretending to be younger than she really was did she not show her fear of advancing years? Perhaps Mrs. Eddy also believed that _truth_ as well as _time_ had lost all claims upon Christian Scientists. To change a lie into a truth, all that is necessary is to deny that "time-tables and calendars" have any meaning to the believer in eternity. One could even commit murder and deny that a bullet or a knife could possibly deprive a man, who is _all mind_, of his life. Mrs. Eddy and her book, I suppose, will be about all the protection we shall have against the lightning, the storm, or the cold, or against hunger, ignorance, and crime. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of world this would be when stripped of everything but Mrs. Eddy's "inspired" metaphysics. In the State of Washington the Christian Scientists, as soon as they had acquired sufficient political power to do it, abolished the law requiring the medical inspection of children in the public schools. But who will be the greatest sufferers from this foolish ordinance? The children, of course: the pupils afflicted with defective vision or throat and nose maladies will be deprived of the benefits of human knowledge and experience. Their prayer for better sight, for freer breathing and unhampered speech, will remain unheeded, upon the plea that sight, hearing, and speech are of the Mind, and that bodily obstructions cannot interfere with them. The Washington state law abolishing the physical examination of public-school children gives us an idea of what to expect under a metaphysical government.