Mary Baker Eddy writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (pp. 269, 270): "The lie and the liar are self-destroyed. Truth is immortal. 'Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: ... for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.' The cycle of good obliterates the epicycle of evil." The word epicycle is derived from two Greek words meaning "upon" and "circle," and according to the dictionary it is a small circle "the center of which is carried upon the circumference of a large circle."
Much of earthly experience seems to go round and round in a closed and limited circle in which the same things happen again and again. Summer and winter, day and night, waking and sleeping, birth and death, may be regarded as part of supposititious mortal mind's attempt to counterfeit "the cycles of good." Whereas, in reality, "the cycle of good," the cycle of spiritual understanding, unfolds and expands ever more and more in the perpetual unfolding of the divine cycles of light.
Mrs. Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 509): "The periods of spiritual ascension are the days and seasons of Mind's creation, in which beauty, sublimity, purity, and holiness—yea, the divine nature—appear in man and the universe never to disappear." Periods of spiritual ascension are not measurable in terms of time, space, or physicality; they are "the cycle of good," forever unfolding.
