First of all, the present in time suffers the want of ceasing and sinking back into the past, into unreality. We can overcome this only by raising everything past from its grave, so to speak, and drawing it simultaneously into the present. To the eternally present, nothing past, ending or ceasing can exist.
On the other hand the present in time suffers the same want in the opposite direction, inasmuch as everything future is excluded therefrom and this future growing reality must therefore be drawn into the eternal. Neither past nor future can exist to God; He lives life undividedly, without limitations, and needs not, as man, plot out his existence in a series of moments. Eternity then is not identical with unending time; it is a different form of existence, related to time as the perfect to the imperfect.
Difficult as it is to explain what eternity implies as the perfect form of existence, it is no less difficult to comprehend the infinite wealth of content that such a form includes. We will therefore give a few brief suggestions in this direction.
How poor in content is everything present to man, and likewise how defective and unsatisfactory is his whole life here in time. As a matter of fact we can in each moment only think one thought, perform one act, satisfy one want. We read a book and we are only conscious of one line or one sentence at a time. We listen to a musical creation or admire an exhibition of art, and we only hear a few harmonies, or see a few details of one picture, more distinctly at the time, and so on. How much richer would not our life be if we could think the book from beginning to end at once, hear the harmony of the entire oratorio, now focus the beauties in smallest details of the whole picture-gallery to one point. It even dazzles our spiritual eye if we enlarge the range of such a rich intuition to encompass not only our nearest environments but our whole earth or possibly our entire solar system, and yet we have only taken one step on a road that has no end. Our solar system is only an insignificant point among those innumerable worlds that form the Milky Way, beyond which the astronomers surmise the existence of other hosts of stars without limit. If we now could share in life at every point in this infinity of worlds, would then our conception of the content of eternity be exact? By no means. We must include in this present moment everything that has happened on these worlds since the dawn of time and similarly all that will occur in the millenniums to come. Is the eternal measure now full and overflowing? By no means. Above us and below us there are beings to whom other universes exist as infinite in all directions as our own. All these infinities of infinities must be drawn into eternity, but then, surely, the measure must be full. By no means. We have all this time moved within the realm of phenomena, that is to say, in the finite world; all this is only a faint shadow of the wealth that eternity contains. God lives in a light that no man hath seen nor yet can see.
In this light, in this perfectness, man is a part of the divine entity. This life in God’s eternal consciousness is man’s primary and original existence. Only in a secondary meaning is he a self-existent personality and is then no more identical with God than the cell is with man.
Man as an entity for himself must have the natural limitations of the part. Conceived by God man is eternal in the divine sense, but conceived by himself man’s eternal life is clothed in the limitations we call time. The eternal is a constant present without beginning or end, without past or future. What is present to man must suffer these limitations; in other words, man must be born, must go through an evolution, or what is the same, become to himself what he has been eternally to God. In this respect man’s relation to God may be compared to the relation of a newborn child to its earthly father. To him the nature and scope of the child is perfectly clear, but the child is unconscious of it and must awaken to an understanding thereof, that is to say, must become to itself what it already is to its father.
Living beings form a continuous series in the absolute organism. This series is such that the higher beings form the conditions and supports of the lower. This connection must be entirely reversed during evolution itself, which naturally proceeds from the lower to the higher. In time therefore the generation and development of the lower beings must precede that of the higher. We have also seen that the evolution of the former is identical with the upbuilding of the organisms of the latter, and we understand now that the whole process must essentially follow the course which, as we have previously shown, it does in fact, actually take.
It is further the inherent idea of time that man’s eternal entity cannot appear whole and undivided. He must plot it out along a series of successive moments which make room for only one cell-generation at a time. As the cell’s entity again has a less comprehensive content than man’s, its lifetime must be correspondingly shorter.