When a spiritual idea dawns upon human consciousness, its establishment, development, and protection necessarily involve both organization and time. From the standpoint of absolute Christian Science, however, according to its Discoverer and Founder, Mary Baker Eddy, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 249), "organization and time have nothing to do with Life." Here we have a paradox, a situation which on its face appears contradictory, but which, when understood metaphysically, is demonstrably true; for a moment's reflection will show that organization and time, being comparative terms, have no application to a purely spiritual concept of existence. To a human sense of progress, however, organization and time are both indispensable and inseparable. The one cannot exist without the other, because they are the essential accessories of any human achievement, even the attainment of that understanding of God which is Life eternal.
The term "organization," according to the dictionary, is defined as "the systematic union of individuals in a body whose officers, agents, and members work together for a common end;" also, as "a society of individuals prepared for systematic cooperation." It was by such means as this that Moses, after the visit of Jethro, his father-in-law, subdivided the responsibility of judging the children of Israel, and taught his followers obedience to the laws which God had revealed to him on Sinai.
Paul, after his conversion to Christianity, looking back over more than a thousand years of Jewish history, saw that the Mosaic law had worked as a leaven in human thought to stir latent sin to the surface, thus giving the appearance that the law itself had been the cause of sin. He therefore sums up the case in the following illuminating dialogue: "Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: ... for I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. ... For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me."
