Editorial May 15, 1920 Issue

Time and Space

Gustavus S. Paine

In any case of so-called physical disease, the belief is that the trouble is in a particular place at a specific time. The discord is supposed to begin at some instant, run a course either gradual or swift, and lead to some end. It is also assumed to have a material location in accord with the testimony of the human senses. For healing, therefore, such falsities must be replaced with the understanding of the eternity and infinity of right action, ever going on in the divine Mind. The one Mind, which is God, is truly the one place in which is all spiritual and real manifestation. In this Mind, the genuine man lives and moves and has his whole being. This fact the student of Christian Science must be constantly proving.

Divine metaphysics, as presented by Mrs. Eddy, has long since explained that the mortal concepts of time and space are mere surmises. What one has of time, after all, is simply one's concept of time, and what one has of place is one's concept of place. It is interesting to see that research and reasoning even on a physical basis are approaching the same conclusion. Analysis of matter finds sooner or later the nothingness of matter as an illusion of the supposed mortal mind, because there is nothing else to find out about matter. Such reasoning along the line of the physical sciences does not, however, establish the actual allness of Spirit and its spiritual manifestation. Christian Science alone can demonstrate the entirety of spiritual consciousness infinitely expressed.

How many people have stopped to think that when they have gone a mile in a railway train, they are also supposed to have gone many miles because of the rotation and revolution of the earth? This latter experience they have been accustomed to measure in terms of time. Yet that very sense of time is, after all, but an attempt to conceive of space. In other words, any physicist would grant at once that what are known as time and space are simply different ways of considering what is essentially incapable of being so differentiated. Indeed, the whole illusion must be replaced with the true sense of infinite action in Mind, quite apart from matter. Christian Science shows clearly that attempts at mortal measurements are utterly inexact and unreliable. On page 595 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy gives the following definition: "Time. Mortal measurements; limits, in which are summed up all human acts, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, knowledge; matter; error; that which begins before, and continues after, what is termed death, until the mortal disappears and spiritual perfection appears." On page 584 she also says: "The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded."

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