IN crossing the bridge which connects the passing year with a new one, the more thoughtful are apt to look back, and then forward, and this always with the hope that the new year will bring better things than has the old. If it should fail to fulfil this expectation, it would only prove that the hope had not unfolded into faith and thus laid hold upon eternal reality. In the physical realm, so called, each year is marked by some sowing and some reaping, and it is even more sure that in the mental realm seedtime and harvest will not fail, for each year will bring in happy fruition some good that was sown in days gone by, and possibly watered with tears; but these will all be forgotten when the harvest of the true and the enduring is reaped.
It is possible that some results of baleful sowing will have to be reaped, but if we are on the side of God and His angels we shall rejoice that "every plant," not a stray one here and there, but every single plant that our "heavenly Father hath not planted," will be "rooted up," and the entire field of human consciousness cleared for the full development of God's ideas. It may be that what seems some giant growth of error will have grown up in mortal history, but when Truth commands, "Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?" we can stand still and see the salvation of God in the destruction of error, whether manifested as disease, sin, mortal tyranny, or useless mortal achievements.
Our revered Leader's definition of year as given in Science and Health (p. 598), lifts thought above a material and finite concept, up to an enlarged sense of man's divine possibilities. She begins by presenting the finite sense as "a solar measurement of time; mortality; space for repentance," and then tells us that "one moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity," to which she adds, "This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown." The one vital question, then, at the beginning of the year, is how much we are going to advance in "the spiritual understanding of Life and Love." The lowliest duties performed with this kept ever before thought will each day become stepping-stones "to higher things," and it should never be forgotten that all service which begins with the noble purpose of reaching perfection means much in the way of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, and that for each one of us the kingdom must begin right where we are, for, as the Master has said, it is neither "lo here!" nor "lo there!" but within our consciousness and expressed in all that reflects the one perfect Mind.
