Time for Study

JOHN STARR HEWITT

Every student of Christian Science rejoices when the opportunity comes to turn to the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy for a period of devout study. Day by day this is the experience of many whose consecrated reflecting of divine Love is surely raising human consciousness into a clearer realization of man's spiritual birthright. But to nearly every one of us there may come now and again occasions when, owing to the pressure of human duties, affairs, and interests, we seem not to have the time to study as we desire.

This claim is a particularly subtle attack of the carnal mind, for it aims to separate our thinking from God, and would plant in our consciousness regret or self-condemnation because we seem unable to carry out a duty and to use a privilege as we should like to do. Then it is that with steadfast clarity of vision we need to realize our indefeasible oneness with God, Mind, divine intelligence, and know that no claim of mortal mind can bind us as to time, place, or circumstance, or limit our understanding to material sense, our substance to materiality, or our life to the so-called mortal experience.

For the correction of this false sense of limitation our Leader has given us in Science and Health (p. 68) a statement which applies healing at the very root of this erroneous concept: "Christian Science presents unfoldment, not accretion." Man is at one with God. All that God is, man is by reflection. Thus all the riches of divine Mind, intelligence, are now the permanent possession of God's children. Nothing can be added to and nothing taken from what God gives us. All things, all reality, "the deep things of God," which are our birthright and unalterable being, can by true study be unfolded daily in our consciousness.

For every session with our textbook we are truly grateful; and the more we study, the better. But the day's work has its place, too. It is in the testing time of the market place that we apply the truths which are unfolded to us in the quiet sessions with our books. It is a fact that Christ Jesus, and Mrs. Eddy, following in his footsteps, lived lives crowded with human duties. Jesus, as we know from the Gospels, spent his days in compassionate work, in healing and teaching; and at night, or early in the morning, he retired to some quiet place to pray. Mrs. Eddy, too, as we learn from her own pen (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 133), found time to retire thrice daily "to seek the divine blessing on the sick and sorrowing." True study is not a matter of accretion or of time. It is unfoldment in eternity, here and now. And such unfoldment is open to each one of us, every moment of the day.

As we follow in the path of our Master and of our Leader, our prayerful desire will help us to find some portion of each day which can be devoted to study of our books. Often we may be forced to lay them aside and take up the duties that call us. But the unfoldment once started need not stop, just because we have not the books in hand. Indeed, it cannot stop, for the blessing has been planted in our consciousness, and the truth will irrestistibly unfold by the very fact of its oneness with omnipotence. One of our great needs is to grasp the nature of true study. True study includes eagerness, zeal, diligence. These purely mental and desirable qualities can be with us every moment and every day. They transcend limitations of time, place, condition. They are elemental to everything worthy that has been accomplished by humankind. The value of any period of time, be it long or short, devoted to study of time, be depends upon the eagerness with which we surrender self and worldliness in order to come closer in thought to God, and upon the diligence with which we hold thought to the good which is unfolded to us.

Man, the real man, the true selfhood of each individual, knows no time. He is now living in eternity, unfolding in infinity. Eagerness, zeal, diligence can and will bring us into realization of the truth, which throws divine light on every page we read, on every thought we think, on every righteous deed we perform. With our thought and experience thus transformed, the time we spend in study multiplies its fruitfulness many fold. Conversely, too, we find more freedom from the domination of the time sense. Much that has seemed essential in the human routine drops back into a less important place. And so we find ourselves released for more diligent striving to enter into the spiritual understanding of the Bible and our Leader's writings. Time for study thus ceases to be a problem.

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