Christian Science confirms what the Apostle John recorded on the mount of revelation, namely that the spiritual creation of God, including individual man, is perpetually new. God, divine Mind, declared (Rev.21:5), "Behold, I make all things new."
Mind's creation of spiritual ideas is new, not in the sense of having existed for a short time, but in the sense of being different or distinguished from the material concept of creation. It is not new in the sense of having been brought into existence only to grow old and terminate in its turn, but new in the sense of being eternal, without beginning or end. John records (Rev. 21:1), "I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away." John's spiritual sense of the eternally new creation of Mind exposed the falsity of a creation in which matter and time are elements.
Matter and time are unreal concepts of the so-called mortal mind. Finite objects of sense, which begin and end, mortal mind calls matter; the duration between a moment of beginning and a moment of ending it calls time. None of the elements of infinite Mind, however, are finite. They neither begin nor end. Therefore, Mind's creation must be forever matterless and timeless.
Mary Baker Eddy states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 245,) "The infinite never began nor will it ever end." Not one of Mind's ideas ever comes into or passes out of existence, but remains forever at the zenith of immutable and unsurpassable perfection.
According to Christian Science, concrete being consists of infinite progression, not of a series of limited, material events; it is spiritual development, not accretion. This progression or development which Christ Jesus embodied is the only real life and substance of spiritual man, the image and likeness of God. Jesus proved that real life in God, in divine Principle, Love, is not a succession of years or of other periods of time, but is the continuous and eternal unfoldment of Truth and Love, the timeless action of immortal consciousness.
Since the real man neither begins nor ends, he can never age. He manifests a timeless sense of renewal. Sunlight may be thought of as symbolizing this timelessness. If a person puts his hand out into the sunlight, withdraws it, and then immediately puts it back, he does not put his hand back into the same particles of light, for the sunlight is constantly flowing; it never accumulates, even for a moment.
Irrespective of the false testimony of physical sense, man is not an inert mass of aging, fleshly elements, but the vital expression of perpetually new intelligence. Where there is perpetual newness of infinite ideas, there can be no accumulation, accretion, or ossification of finite, material beliefs. Thus man cannot be made up of material atoms, cells, molecules, or other formations of false consciousness. He cannot have or live in a corporeal body at all, for he himself is the incorporeal embodiment of all the spiritual verities of Mind. His being is holiness, harmony, and immortality, infinitely separate from the dream of mortal, bodily existence. A realization of these grand verities brings to human experience perennial freshness, vigor, and freedom of action and eliminates generally accepted beliefs of diminution, rigidity, and decrepitude.
The one infinite Life, or perpetual good, is always now and here. The individual who holds his thought steadfastly to this scientific fact will not become mesmerized by the erroneous belief that good exists in time or matter. His thought will not be darkened by fruitless yearnings for a material past or future but will open to the nowness and completeness of spiritual living and loving.
The Bible assures us (II Pet. 3:8), "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years." Since all good is spiritual and eternal therefore ever present, there is just as much good to be experienced today through spiritual enlightenment and demonstration as there ever has been or as there ever will be. There is only today, the eternal now of joyous, timeless, divine consciousness.
A young man who was a student of Christian Science became occasionally engulfed in deep melancholy. During these periods of darkness, he suffered from the painful delusion that a curtain had fallen on life, shutting off all good in the past. He felt that he had come to the end of a journey through a long succession of years.
Turning to God for spiritual enlightenment, the young man was led to read in the Bible the statement from II Peter, quoted in a preceding paragraph. Suddenly he was awakened to see that unconsciously he had been accepting a false claim of inherited melancholy. He was also awakened to the necessity of defending himself daily against the claim of animal magnetism: that life is a temporary, personally inherited experience in matter and time. His healing came, for he now saw that the only real life must be perpetually new, a fadeless, spiritual consciousness of ever-present good.
All human discord is involved in the illusion that man is a finite, mortal creature, confined within the narrow limits of matter and time. Christ, through Christian Science, has come to destroy this illusion and to enable all men to understand and prove the real nature of man as the perpetually new reflection of God, infinite Spirit. St. Paul declared (II Cor. 5:17), "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." And Mrs. Eddy assures us in Science and Health (p. 300,) "So far as the scientific statement as to man is understood, it can be proved and will bring to light the true reflection of God—the real man, or the new man (as St. Paul has it)."
