Mary Baker Eddy writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 230), "Notwithstanding the sacrilegious moth of time, eternity awaits our Church Manual, which will maintain its rank as in the past, amid ministries aggressive and active, and will stand when those have passed to rest." Mrs. Eddy's appraisal of the spiritual nature of the Manual of The Mother Church challenges the thought of all who would follow her God-inspired leadership. One who possesses merely a human sense of things, however, might ask, "How can eternity be said to await any human doctrine?" The answer is in its essential spiritual derivation and character. Only through spiritual discernment, therefore, can the true nature of the Manual be seen and understood.
Eternity is not an endless duration of time; it is no time at all. Whatever is spiritual, then, exists independently of time. In fact, the Revelator referred to a state of spiritual enlightenment in which there would be time no longer (see Rev. 10:6).
Jesus was speaking of his eternal, spiritual identity when he said (John 8:58), "Before Abraham was, I am." The same thing is true of each one of us. Every individual possesses by divine inheritance the qualities that belonged to the Master. His words and works tended to waken human thought to the recognition of man's spiritual identity, which today we "see through a glass, darkly; but then"—as thought becomes spiritually enlightened—"face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12).
