Article September 8, 1917 Issue

Eternity versus Time

KATHARINE MERRILL

On the door of a shop that many people enter hung a card with the brightly colored words, "Time is just a little precious bit of eternity." To a Scientist who passed the door came instantly the opposite truth, "Time is no part of eternity" (Science and Health, p. 468). The one who phrased and prepared the card intended to check the waste of time by making the reader pause to consider the value of his time: but the motive nevertheless was only a partial thought after all, a truth half perverted.

For what is time valuable? For nothing, men admit, except the measure of life it includes and the opportunities it affords. Men think of these opportunities mostly in terms of pleasure getting and money making, in terms of the play and the business of the world, the "going to and fro in the earth." The measure of life and the opportunities supposedly given by time are thought wasted unless there is definite visible gain to represent them; or, as some one has said, "unless there is something to show for it all." This thought too is usually a perversion, because gains visible and tangible are too often in their nature merely material. They are mostly based on the belief in the value of matter and material objects as true essence, substance, things to be prized in and for themselves, apart from the thought which created them or which is represented or expressed in them. Men indeed are not always blind to underlying thought, as for instance in the case of a gift from a friend,—a gift whose smallness may be apologized for and excused because of the love that goes with it. Yet many are tempted to feel that they could prize the love more if the object could be rated higher.

The opportunities men seek are as a rule opportunities to acquire,—to acquire friends, home, property, ease, learning, position, fame, and the multiplicity of objects upon which humanity dotes. But from the standpoint of absolute truth the real value of any object, whether friendship, a flower, or a business, becomes clear only as we spiritualize our sense of it, as we see and properly estimate the value of the thought that produced it and the purpose for which it exists,—to express to human sense truthfulness and beauty and utility. It thus becomes a manifestation of these spiritual qualities, one of the diversified forms in which these qualities shine through the mist of mortal thinking.

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