Editorial November 24, 1951 Issue

THERE IS NO TIME

Richard J. Davis

The revelator of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, with inspired vision uncovers the bondage of time and its association with everything that is mortal and finite. In the Glossary of her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 595), she defines "time" thus: "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."

How clear it is that everything we do or say humanly is largely concerned with days, hours, years, and even centuries; and yet one day with Mind and its infinitude is as a thousand years. We think and act in terms of time. All plans for what we call the future and all our so-called memories of a past are associated with the element of time. The lives and careers of mortals are, according to belief, crowded into a mortal time measurement, which plays such an important part in human affairs that unconsciously mortal man is virtually its slave.

The writer of Ecclesiastes with penetrating insight perceived and analyzed time's ephemeral nature. "To every thing there is a season," he said (Eccl. 3:1,2), "and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die." But turning away from the transient and mortal sense of existence, he glimpsed the permanency and continuity of real being (verses 14, 15): "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him. That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past."

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