"Now is the accepted time"
"Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation," declared Paul in his second epistle to the Corinthians. "Now is." There is no "is-to-be," in reality, for God is All-in-all. He is now. All through the Scriptures we read, "God is," "God is." Not once do we find that God will not be God until to-morrow; that God will not be Love until next month. He is Love this instant; and no evidence of the material senses to the contrary can change the fact.
To make more complete cures in the practice of Christian Science, and to make them more quickly, we must realize more perfectly the omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient reality of God. God's creation is complete now, and the real man does now express all the qualities of God; for, as Mrs. Eddy states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 465), "Principle and its idea is one." Man has always reflected and does now reflect all the qualities of God. Nothing shall by any means separate man for a moment from his divine Principle, or cause him to express less than all of the attributes of Principle. Nor is there any power able to cause him to express anything which is contrary to Principle, the altogether lovely and lovable God. In healing so-called chronic and incurable cases of illness, we need to remember, first of all, that there is no such thing in real existence as a chronic or incurable case. The only thing that cannot be changed by any means is the work of God, the relation of man to his divine Cause. Sickness is not a part of the changeless Being who is God; false belief is wholly mortal, changing, and self-destructive. There is, there can be, no real disease.
If, as stated, there is in reality no sickness, what is there for the Christian Scientist to do? Is he without any healing work to perform? No, he has a very real work to do; but it is not the healing of man. God created man to have dominion over all; and so, disease cannot gain control of man. All that God created He saw as "very good;" and we are told that He made all that was made. So, man, who has always been and always will be the image and likeness of God, good, is not, never has been, and never can be sick; and thus the work of the Scientist can never be that of healing man. Disease is not true or real, because it is not of God; it does not express any of the attributes of God. It can, then, be nothing but a false belief of mortal, so-called mind, with no beginning and no existence in the realm of Truth. It has the same supposititious basis as the error that two times two are five. In correcting this mathematical mistake we do not have to destroy anything.
All that we need to do is to replace the false statement that two times two are five with the right one that two times two are four. We do not, in making such a correction, destroy anything or create anything. We simply let go of the wrong belief, and bring to bear upon the problem the truth which applies to that particular problem. So, in handling a claim of disease all that needs to be done, and what must be done, is to find and apply the truth,—to find and apply the perfect law of God to each particular problem.
The work of the Christian Scientist, then, is to be so in harmony at all times with divine Principle, God, that he is able to apply God's law correctly to each problem. His understanding of the truth must be so clear that his very life is a healing influence. He must be able to speak to discord as one having authority, as one who knows that because it is the opposite of Truth it is unreal, nothing, and that there is no power behind it to enable it to operate to harm man in any way.
The harmony of divine Principle can be made manifest only as the practitioner gives up his sense material for the understanding of man as the perfect, eternal, harmonious reflection of God, and as the reflection of nothing else. He must know that "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up." He must lift up the Christ. To do this he must become Christlike, pure, self-sacrificing, loving, so clear a transparency for Truth that he is a witness of the Christ; and as the Christ is lifted up, so men are drawn to him to be healed of their false beliefs. In being so lifted up, he must be humble, so that he shall give up all sense of personal responsibility or personal selfhood in the work of God; he must know that there is only one infinite Person, God; and that man is the reflection of this one Person,—that of himself he can do nothing. But he must also know that "with God all things are possible;" and that God is causing him to reflect His power. His light must so shine that men will see his good works and glorify the "Father which is in heaven." This light must be kept burning brightly by the performance of good works, which follow as the direct result of a life devoted to the one only Mind, to the thinking of good thoughts,—true thoughts, reflected from that Mind, about the eternal relation of God to His idea, man.
A life devoted to such works and to such thoughts cannot fail to bring about such a clear sense of the presence of man's perfection, because of the ever-presence of God's love, that the healing work will be done instantaneously, as was that of Jesus. If our lives were as free from error as that of Jesus was, we too might say, "Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk," without any question as to the duration of the claim, or the symptoms, or the environment, in which the crippled one might seem to be living. But Jesus required of the supplicants for healing both faith and willingness to be obedient. His three years of instantaneous healing work were possible only as a result of the thirty years which went before, spent in learning more of God and of man as His image. They were possible because he had so thoroughly overcome the world and all that therein is; because he himself was so lifted up above materiality that he knew without doubt that there is no diseased man, no sinning man, no man who could express other than the truth. He knew that God never created disease or sin; hence man cannot be subject to them. He demonstrated that God is good, that God is All, and that therefore all is good. When we have purified ourselves as Jesus was pure, we shall indeed have awaked in God's likeness, and shall do many wonderful works, even as he did.
