Editorial June 9, 1906 Issue

"Now is the accepted time."

John B. Willis

Our true attainment and availability are determined by the content of our now; its spiritual richness or its poverty registers our realization of being, measures our actual possessions, and all this gives a larger significance to the coming of Christian Science, whose mission it is to declare and bring into demonstration the truth of the Master's startling words when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand."

No one is getting that which he should get out of human experience who is not profiting by the lessons of the past and who does not entertain an ideal which calls for an infinite future; nevertheless it is true that human bondage to fear, regret, anxiety, procrastination, etc., is in large part the result of the erroneous idea that we can live in another time than the present. More than this, the displacement of good in thought often means the loss of its vital and most inspiring truth. For example, the great body of Christian believers have been led to think of creation as an event which transpired in the indefinite past,—an enterprise which absorbed God's time for a series of days or periods and was thereupon completed. Such a view could but give rise to a mechanical sense of the prevailing order as one in which so-called natural laws or secondary causes are operating under divine provision to effect the phenomena of the universe, a sense which has practically dissipated the consciousness of God's sustaining and protecting nearness.

To this false concept Christian Science presents an antipodal contrast in its teaching that we are under both the metaphysical and the Scriptural necessity of thinking of creation as the ceaseless manifestation of that divine activity which constitutes all being and which fills the infinite present with good. All things are always becoming in Truth, and as this is apprehended in Christian Science, we realize that all reality is of God, and therefore good, the 91st Psalm takes on a new and healing significance, and the assurance of safety in Love's o'ershadowing presence rests like a benediction upon the heart. God is indeed at hand and not afar off, the old sense of things has passed away, and all things have become new.

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