"Time and medication"

ONE of the beliefs in materiality which often comes up to the Christian Science practitioner, as well as to others, is the belief in time as a healing agent. "I suppose it will take time for a thing like this to be healed," a patient may remark, and the practitioner has then to explain that time is not a factor in the process of healing any more than are material drugs and hygiene, but is a belief which has to be overcome, just as reliance on material medicine has to be overcome. The practitioner has continually to be on guard against this subtle belief in time, both for himself and for his patient. No matter what the nature of the disease may be, neither practitioner nor patient should expect that more than one treatment will be required to heal it. Many slow healings are the result of just this belief that a series of treatments may be necessary in order to cure the patient. If the belief is allowed to enter that it will take time for the disease to be destroyed, then the healing process has descended to the level of faith cure, and is not the effectual operation of an understanding of Principle.

Our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, on page 398 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," classes the belief in time with the belief in medication. She writes, "So also faith, co-operating with a belief in the healing effects of time and medication, will soothe fear and change the belief of disease to a belief of health." Time, then, is as positively a material remedy as is ordinary medicine, and if either patient or practitioner is expressing a belief, or silently cherishing a belief, that time will help in the healing, then he is not relying upon the ever present power of Truth, but is removing his demonstration into a supposititious future. So treated, the disease is not cured on a scientific basis,—that is, through the understanding of absolute Truth, devoid of any faith in a material agency. Time, being a material concept, is not a healing agent, but is simply the measuring line of that which is mortal and finite. If every mortal and material concept were destroyed, time also would lapse, for there would be nothing finite left to measure or limit. Truth cannot be measured by time, for Truth, reality, is eternal. There are no periods to that which is true. So, also, Life is not subject to limitation; it is not terminated nor divided into periods of life, death, and eternity. Life is immortal, therefore measureless, because Life is God. Neither can Love be conceived of as being measured by time, for Love is not capable of being divided into periods of love and hate, but is eternally loving, for Love is God. Truth, Life, and Love, or God, being infinite and eternal, time is obviously excluded or eliminated.

Only unreal and temporal beliefs, then, can be measured by time, and this is easily illustrated by a simple example. Suppose a child in counting up a sum should make the mistake of believing that six and five equal twelve. Finding that he has got things wrong, he goes over the sum again and eventually learns that six and five equal eleven. The error is thus reduced to nothing, and terminates, while the indestructible fact that six and five are eleven is brought to light,—not created, but made manifest as part of the child's correct knowledge. It is unfolded as a reflection of Mind, intelligence, which has always existed and always will exist. Being a fact, it can never cease to be, whereas the mistake which had seemed to exist to the child for a period of time, long or short according to his energy and application in discovering its falsity, stopped, terminated, or ceased to have an appearance of being, as soon as its nothingness was proved. The same is true of all sickness, sin, sorrow, and death. Their end is inevitable, and so far from requiring a belief of time to heal them, it will be found that time has no more reality than they themselves possess.