In his vision on Patmos, John saw that in absolute reality there is no time; and he set forth this fact in the Apocalypse, in the declaration of the "mighty angel" that "there should be time no longer." In the revelation of Truth to Mary Baker Eddy, the beloved Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, the nothingness of time was no less plain. She therefore defined "time," in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," in part (p. 595), as "error." She said, on page 468 of the same work, "Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity."
The unreality of time is a fact of great interest and value in the practice of Christian Science. It shows, for example, that the suggestion that a disease has been made worse or harder to deal with by time, is without foundation. Any such appearance, plainly, is not due to time, but to belief—the belief that time can do something which, because of its unreality, it cannot do; and when the belief is disposed of, then any difficulty arising from the apparently chronic character of the disease disappears.
The truth is that no disease ever was augmented by time, and that all there is to a disease at any moment is what mortal mind erroneously concedes to it at that moment. A case of rheumatism, for example, that has seemed to go on for ten years or more, is not more potent or real than if the trouble had first seemed to be presented in the moment in which the patient tells the practitioner of it. Similarly, a case of tuberculosis of many years' standing, and even supposedly hereditary, has not been made more genuine or stubborn by the lapse of time.
