Article February 9, 1918 Issue

Time

RACHEL M. PARSONS

The writer has often sought to grasp something of what Mrs. Eddy means by the word eternity. The natural inclination of mortals is to picture time as going on and on for indefinite ages—and thought reels before this picture.

As an illustration of this, in the study of astronomy we deal with enormous extents of time, with thousands and millions of years. We know, for instance, that the stars are all moving at immense speed through space in many different directions, but that they are so distant they appear to be motionless. As far back as records go, the constellations have appeared to the observer to be unchanged; yet to the astronomer those few thousand years to the days of the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese records are as nothing, and by means of his calculations he reasons about a time far ahead, when the appearance of the sky will be completely changed, and when we ourselves and our sun will have changed our positions, too. All this is so far off that the mere number of years conveys very little to us. And yet the astronomer goes farther than this and deals with the evolution of stars, planets, nebulæ, all taking up even greater extents of time, and with the formation, growth, and extinction of worlds.

Yet these great measurements of time do not really give us any idea of eternity. It is overwhelming to be expected to think clearly about what will happen millions of years ahead, or what happened an equally long time ago; yet after all we are still dealing with time, with finite measurements, and we read in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468), "Time is no part of eternity." Now it seems to the writer that we shall never grasp the thought of eternity by thinking of it as an enormously long time, because it is not finite time, measured in days and years, at all. It is rather by losing the sense of passing time that we shall learn more of eternity; by filling our minds, our lives, so full of the activities of Truth that the thought of passing time does not intrude to distract us with its beliefs of limitation, of material growth and decay.

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There Is No Evil
February 9, 1918
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