Editorial September 15, 1945 Issue

The Judgment Day Is Hourly

Paul Stark Seeley

The common human tendency to put off until tomorrow what should be done today causes much trouble, many failures, and resulting unhappiness. Procrastination is the foe of progress and accomplishment. The most serious effect of this negative quality of thought is seen in the delay and obstruction it offers to the gaining by men of that understanding of God and man which brings to light the Science of Life, and man's dominion over sin, disease, and death.

One of the myths that are giving way to rational thought is the age-old belief that at some unknown future date there will be a very important event called judgment day, somewhat similar to a court scene. A human personal deity will judge the good deeds and misdeeds of those arraigned before him, and reward or penalize them according to their past record. Just how, where, or when such an event could be staged defies reason, and many are seeing the unreasonableness of this imaginative belief. Certainly, however, everyone is judged by the Principle that is God, but Christian Science emphasizes the fact that this judgment does not wait on death and the passage of time. It is a rational, present, and continuing occurrence. "Behold, the judge standeth before the door" (James 5:9).

Mary Baker Eddy writes, "No final judgment awaits mortals, for the judgment-day of wisdom comes hourly and continually, even the judgment by which mortal man is divested of all material error" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 291). Our every thought, our every word, our every act, is judged of God in the sense that every right thought, word, or act unites us to God, its source and substance, and the harmony that inheres in man's oneness with Him. Every wrong thought, word, or act inevitably separates us, in belief, from Him and links us to the evil, material mind, its source, and subjects us to its negative, discord-producing forces.

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