Time

Clifford P. Smith

Time is the human concept which ascribes duration and limits to human acts and experiences. It may also give them coincidence and sequence. Like many other human concepts, time is useful, but it may be either beneficial or detrimental. It claims to limit achievement and joy no less than loss and suffering. Indeed, it claims to be the supreme law to which all that is human must submit. In absolute being, however, there is no time. Its claim to govern or limit man is fictitious; it has no sanction other than human belief; hence, it can be proved void.

In many instances Christ Jesus reduced time to a belief and disproved the validity of its requirements. Indeed, almost all his acts of power involved this proof. For one instance, some of his disciples started to row across the Sea of Galilee, but the water became rough because of a great wind. When they had got only a short distance, he went to them, walking on the water. "Then they willingly received him into the ship: and immediately the ship was at the land whither they went." This quotation is from John 6:21, according to the common version. Literally, the Greek text allows a stronger translation. "Then as soon as they consented to take him into the boat, the boat was at the shore they had been trying to reach" (Goodspeed's translation). Moffatt's translation contains the word "instantly." This incident, it is to be observed, could be regarded as an overcoming of space as well as time.

In different ways, other persons have furnished convincing proofs that time-law or time-limit is only a conventional belief. Mrs. Eddy did this by beginning and finishing her wonderful work as the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science after she had passed the point in human life beyond which time is not likely to permit even the beginning of such an important work; also by accomplishing in a few decades results for which time, the customary arbiter, would ordinarily require an extremely long and weary period of waiting. Further, in the practice of Christian Science Mrs. Eddy proved by quick and instantaneous healings the truth of her teaching that "one moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. ... Time is a mortal thought, the divisor of which is the solar year. Eternity is God's measurement of Soul-filled years" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 598, 599). In so far as time enters into the practice of Christian Science, healing becomes convalescence or postponed recovery. Therefore, time is an error to be handled in this practice. There is no need to wait for being to be; it is now. See Science and Health 595:17; "Unity of Good" 11:3.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) defied time by acquiring, during an ordinary lifetime, so much knowledge concerning so many subjects and so much proficiency in all of them that the rest of humanity, even the specialists, did not catch up with his progress until after a century or more of further time. "A painter, sculptor, engineer, architect, physicist, biologist and philosopher was Leonardo, and in each role he was supreme. Perhaps no man in the history of the world shows such a record. His performance, extraordinary as it was, must be reckoned as small compared with the ground he opened up, the grasp of fundamental principles he displayed, and the insight with which he seized upon the true methods of investigation in each branch of enquiry" (Dampier-Whetham's History of Science, p. 113). "Leonardo da Vinci was the most universal genius of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time. He was painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, musician, philosopher, chemist, botanist, and geologist. He was the first great link between Archimedes and the modern scientist" (Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Vol. II, p. 373, footnote). Not deeply religious, Leonardo was at least reverential. Said he, "I leave on one side the sacred writings, because they are the supreme truth."

The extent to which universal consent has made time the arbiter of human destiny is illustrated by the universal belief in cycles of prosperity and depression. Almost everybody believes that prosperity and depression are limited by time; that a period of each must be followed by a period of the other; and that human life is a sequence of such cycles. At present, therefore, almost everybody in Christendom is depending on time for relief from a world-wide depression. We are watching the clock, instead of demonstrating the divine government. Mrs. Eddy expressed the scientific attitude toward the present situation when she said (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 12), "We own no past, no future, we possess only now."

Clifford P. Smith

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Progress Spiritward

January 3, 1931

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