"If I could only live my life over again; if I had known then what I know now. ..." How often wishes like these are expressed today by those yearning for better conditions in their present human experience!

But one can't live his life over again, and one didn't know then what he knows now; so where does he go from here? He goes to the "now" described by the Apostle Paul: "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." ^{II Cor. 6:2;} He must silence the error that insists upon dwelling on the mistakes and poor judgments of the past.

Mrs. Eddy encourages one to act in the immediate present: "If you believe in and practise wrong knowingly, you can at once change your course and do right." ^{Science and Health, p. 253;} There is no delay indicated here. There is no suggestion that one needs to relive his past in order to shape a desirable, righteous future. It is fruitless to yield to the temptation to look backward, brood over past mistakes, and condemn oneself for lack of wisdom in the past. One can lay claim now to an abundance of intelligence and wisdom through reflecting divine Mind, God, the all-bestowing creator.

Paul, who humanly had reason to grieve over the past, writes, "This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." ^{Phil 3:13, 14;} He leaves no question but what the errors of the past must be released from consciousness and forgotten if one is to improve on the past and press toward the prize of perfect, spiritual sonship with God.

There was a period in the writer's life when she spent whole nights rehearsing the past, starting with memories of her earliest childhood and weaving quite an emotional stage play in which she had the leading role. When morning came, she felt exhausted and depressed. On one of these mornings, when life did indeed seem futile, she remarked aloud, "This is hell!" As she had recently started the study of Christian Science, she pondered this remark and wondered whether Mrs. Eddy had anything to say about hell. When she turned to the Glossary in Science and Health for a definition, her thought was sharply arrested by the phrase, "self-imposed agony." ^{Science and Health, p. 588;}

She turned with humility to the Father, praying for a greater understanding of Him as changeless Love, the creator only of perpetual good. She asked for divine guidance that she might see how to relinquish the illusory belief of a discordant, material past. She prayed that she might begin now to express sincere gratitude for the limitless possibilities of the present.

When temptation to dwell in the past again tried to ensnare her, she found a sense of right direction in the thought that only good is real and eternal and that good, the emanation of God, is infinite and always available. In a short time she was able to forget "those things which are behind," and the present became joyful, active, and productive.

When one recognizes and accepts God as his Father-Mother, he can then claim his eternally perfect heritage as the offspring of Spirit, knowing that true selfhood has no mortal history. He ceases to think of himself as portraying the leading character of a human tragedy. He acknowledges spiritual, complete individuality as the only true role of man, who expresses only the all-concordant qualities of his omnipotent creator.

An unhappy memory has never actually had any consciousness in which to exist, nor any way in which to be expressed. Nothing that falsely claims to darken the past has genuine power to cast shadows over the present. Evil cannot prevent its own banishment. It disappears before the sunlight of Truth as we persistently realize and claim that we are free and greatly loved.

"We own no past, no future, we possess only now," states Mrs. Eddy in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany. Further on she adds, "Faith in divine Love supplies the ever-present help and now, and gives the power to 'act in the living present.' " ^{My., p. 12.}