The Christian Scientist is not given to dwelling overmuch on the human divisions of time. He admits that to mankind these divisions may often serve quite a useful purpose, but he looks upon them largely as milestones along the highway of life. He has come to understand something about real life or the life of Life, about its continuous, eternal, infinite nature; he has learned that his real selfhood is inseparable from God, Life, and that it is therefore everlastingly continuous, or immortal; and just as these truths have been discerned by him, the temporal sense of things has given place to the eternal sense of being. And this clearer spiritual understanding serves to raise his thinking even in regard to the periods or seasons usually celebrated by mankind.
When one thinks of it, the training of the average mortal is to a very large extent along material lines. He is taught to think chiefly of the so-called material universe, of its varied and numerous phenomena and the laws supposed to be sustaining them. It is matter, matter, almost all the time with him. No doubt many are introduced to moral law and its bearing on human life at an early age, and possibly are led thereby to feel the presence of a power other than evil, a power which they may believe is making for universal righteousness; but ever apparently accosting them on all sides is materiality, and the conflicting forces of good and evil.
Now it was to free mankind from the bondage of materialism, with its inevitable belief in death, that Christ Jesus came proclaiming that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand." God was not a God afar off to him: God was the loving Father who knew the needs of all His children, and whose divine oversight extended even to the humblest idea of His infinite creation. To Christ Jesus, God was Spirit, Truth, Love, Life, the cause of all reality. And the Master gave his message of God's immanence to the world with the sole purpose of regenerating mankind, with the sole intent that men should awaken out of the dream of materiality into that newness of life which always follows the understanding of spiritual truth. It was Paul who said, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."
