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THE SPIRITUAL OPPOSITES OF PLACE AND TIME

From the October 1949 issue of The Christian Science Journal


IN the realm of human existence it is considered impossible for anything material to be in two places at once, to be here and at the same time to be somewhere else. Yet the science of mathematics is always available everywhere, never confined partially or wholly to any one place. Christian Science teaches that God is both here and everywhere all of the time. The truth of the ever-presence of God is realized when we stop to reflect that there can be no place where all of God is not always present. It is fundamentally true and provable that God is omnipresent and infinite, complete and perfect, and that His presence is always both here and everywhere.

To conceive of eternality may seem somewhat of an effort and perhaps even be a bit disturbing if we are accustomed to measuring the passage of time in terms of days, months, years, centuries. God's creation is forever unfolding in infinite variety and unending loveliness, freshness, and glory. Our active part in this continuing unfoldment is indicated by Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she tells us (p. 258), "God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis." The notions of time and place, which would claim to hamper this infinite unfoldment, are characteristic of the restrictive nature of human thinking.

For thousands of years men have located things as existing at various points in space called "places." The system of geometry generally taught in schools has been content to locate and describe objects in terms of the three dimensions of ordinary space known as length, breadth, and depth. But with the increasing development of human thought, Euclidean geometry has progressed to the point of adding a fourth dimension called "time." Men had accustomed themselves to thinking of the passage of events in terms of time and finally united their concepts of place and time in what they call "space time," a system by means of which physicists and philosophers attempt to describe all matter as existing at a location in time as well as a location in space.

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