For most of us January first is a date we observe annually as a new beginning, a symbol of fresh hope, a season when we traditionally take stock of the past and make plans for a better future. As Mrs. Eddy says, "A new year is a nursling, a babe of time, a prophecy and promise clad in white raiment, kissed— and encumbered with greetings—redolent with grief and gratitude." Pulpit and Press, p. 1; We feel we are turning a page, as it were, in the book of human life and starting a new chapter in the saga of our development.
Yet this recurring first day on the Gregorian calendar has not, in truth, any real significance to God or to His spiritual ideas—to us in our true being—since, as our Leader points out in Science And Health With key to the Scriptures, "Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity." Science and Health, p. 468;
Immortal men and women—we, in our real, spiritual being—live eternally in Spirit, not matter. All good, spiritual gifts belong to man—to us—now and forever. Spiritual man coexists with infinite Love, the source of his being, and he looks neither backward with longing or regret, nor forward with hope or trepidation. As the expression of eternal Mind, he is conscious of being invariably at the point of fulfillment, in the presence of and as a witness to that infinite spiritual beauty and pure goodness of Soul which ensure his—our—perpetual, uninterrupted, sinless joy and harmony.
