Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
( — from Longfellow’s poem, “A Psalm of Life” )
“TIME. 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 appear.” (Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 595:17.) Mrs. Eddy Eddy discovered the only dimension in which God is operative: the now. “Now is the accepted time.”
Webster, 1828 – Time:
“1. Pertaining to this life or this world or the body only; secular; as temporal concerns; temporal affairs. In this sense, it is opposed to spiritual. Let not temporal affairs or employments divert the mind from spiritual concerns, which are far more important . . . .
2. Measured or limited by time, or by this life or this state of things; having limited existence; opposed to eternal.”
“The things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18)
As time is finite, so “the reliable now” — see quote below — is infinite: the realm of the eternal present, the world of “Before Abraham was, I AM,” the abode of “Christ, the same, yesterday, today, and forever,” the kingdom in and from which Christ Jesus worked the works of God, and in which the Christ, long before and after the earthly life of Jesus, has always been working for all eternity.
Principle cannot possibly work the works of Christ except in the now; likewise its workesr are required to dwell in the now as well.
“Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does ever last.”
[ — from Abraham Cowley, Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David (1656), Book I, lines 361-362]
A significant number of today’s influential theologians and Bible teachers are “cessationists”: insisting dogmatically that the works of the creative Principle of the universe as practiced by Christ Jesus are long past, ceased when the age of the apostles ceased. But this is like saying, “Two plus two equals four was true only in the days of the apostles, but not now.”
This was an emphatic rule of St. Paul: “Behold, now is the accepted time.” A lost opportunity is the greatest of losses. Whittier mourned it as what “might have been.” We own no past, no future, we possess only now. If the reliable now is carelessly lost in speaking or in acting, it comes not back again. Whatever needs to be done which cannot be done now, God prepares the way for doing; while that which can be done now, but is not, increases our indebtedness to God. Faith in divine Love supplies the ever-present help and now, and gives the power to “act in the living present.”
(Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 12:17)