Eternal recurrence

“ That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our “immortality,” if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” ”

“ And just such a survey, and just such a life, not timeless, but time-inclusive, constitute the eternal, which is real, not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning. ”

“ Hence we see that no words can more forcibly express the grand characteristics of eternity than these. It is that duration which is concealed, hidden, or kept secret from all created beings; which is always existing, still running On but never running Out; an interminable, incessant, and immeasurable duration; it is That, in the whole of which God alone can be said to exist, and that which the eternal mind can alone comprehend. ”

“ Betwixt a minute and a million of years there is some proportion, but betwixt time and eternity there is none. The long lives of the patriarchs were nothing to God, not so much as the life of a child (that is born and dies the same day) is to theirs. 2. All the events of a thousand years, whether past or to come, are as present to the Eternal Mind as what was done yesterday, or the last hour, is to us, and more so. God will say, at the great day, to those whom he has turned to destruction, Return—Arise you dead. ”

“ The eternity of his nature; if he is from everlasting, he will be to everlasting, and we must have recourse to this first principle, when things seen, which are temporal, are discouraging, that we have hope and help sufficient in a god that is not seen, that is eternal. "Art thou not from everlasting, and then wilt thou not make bare thy everlasting arm, in pursuance of thy everlasting counsels, to make unto thyself an everlasting name?" ”

“ For eternity possessing permanency, both according to its inward energy, and that which it exerts to things eternal, Time being assimilated to it, according to the former of these energies, becomes separated from it according to the latter, abiding and being moved. ”

“ It is the Eternal, the Uncreated, the Undying, to whom time brings no change. For time is always flowing and never stays: it is a vessel charged with birth and death: it has a before and after, a ‘will be’ and a ‘has been:’ it belongs to the ‘is not’ rather than to the ‘is.’ But God is: and that not in time but in eternity, motionless, timeless, changeless eternity, that has no before or after: and being One, He fills eternity with one Now, and so really ‘is,’ not ‘has been,’ or ‘will be’, without beginning and without ceasing. ”

“ Then I interrogate myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question—If I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible ”

“ I fear that many have a sort of vague notion that there is some interval or space of time between death and their eternal state. They fancy they shall go through a kind of purifying change, and that though they die unfit for heaven, they shall yet be found meet for it after all! ”

“ One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, would prolong the longevity of mortals a thousand years. This exalted view, continued and retained when the Science of Being is understood, would bridge over, with Life discerned spiritually, the interval of Death; and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown. Time is a mortal thought, whose divisor is the solar year. Eternity is God's measurement of Soul-filled years. ”

“ Suppose you were now in ignorance respecting the doctrine of life and immortality through a resurrection. You know you must die, and sincerely think that death will terminate your existence forever. You see your children one after another laid upon their dying bed, and with distraction shake the farewell hand of eternal separation, and with the most solemn melancholy and wo, look forward to the period when you must follow them down to the chambers of eternal silence, and cease to be. ”

“ To me it seems more fitting, for purposes of explanation to the mortal mind, to conceive of eternity as a cycle and the eternal purpose as an endless circle, a cycle of eternity in some way synchronized with the transient material cycles of time. ”

“ But we are told that the eternity of God is a fixed eternal now, from which all ideas of succession, of past and future, are to be excluded; and we are called upon to conceive of eternal duration without reference to past or future, and to the exclusion of the idea of that flow under which we conceive of time. The proper abstract idea of duration is, however, simple continuance of being, without any reference to the exact degree or extent of it, because in no other way can it be equally applicable to all the substances of which it is the attribute. ”

“ Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem, must end in time. The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul presupposes an eternal origin.... An obvious objection, and one often urged against this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a previous life.... The new organisation with its new entries must necessarily efface the record of the old. ”

“ Thou hast told me already, O Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that thou art eternal and alone hast immortality. Thou art not changed by any shape or motion, and thy will is not altered by temporal process, because no will that changes is immortal. ”

“ God manifested in the flesh is Eternity in the form of Time. But Eternity in relation to Time is the absolute to the conditional, or the real to the apparent, and Redemption must partake of both;—always perfected, for it is a Fiat of the Eternal;—continuous, for it is a process in relation to man ”

“ That which we call this present life, in reality, has no end; that which we call time is in reality eternity. We say the dead have departed this life as though they had departed to some other life. This, however, is not so; dying is like going from one room to another, or from one part of the earth to another, the life still exists though the body decays, but the life which dwelt in it is indestructible. ”

“ It is eternal in regard to duration in this sense, that it has no awakening; its tendency is to persist forever. But that is not to say that God cannot bring one from a state of eternal death into that of eternal life. ”

“ December 19th. "We find that man, or the spiritual man, is equipped with two sets of correspondences." One set possesses the quality of everlastingness, the other is temporal. But unless these are separated by some means the temporal will continue to impair and hinder the eternal. The final preparation, therefore, for the inheriting of Eternal Life must consist in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. ”

“ Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of
Life, and time is no part of eternity. One ceases in
468:30 proportion as the other is recognized. Time is finite;
469:1 eternity is forever infinite. Life is neither in nor of mat-
ter. What is termed matter is unknown to Spirit, which
469:3 includes in itself all substance and is Life eternal. Mat-
ter is a human concept. Life is divine Mind. Life is not
limited. Death and finiteness are unknown to Life. ”

“ But time passing away by its changefulness, cannot be co-eternal with changeless eternity. And consequently, though the immortality of the angels does not pass in time, does not become past as if now it were not, nor has a future as if it were not yet, still their movements, which are the basis of time, do pass from future to past; and therefore they cannot be co-eternal with the Creator, in whose movement we cannot say that there has been that which now is not, or shall be that which is not yet. ”

“ The word eternal is used in two senses in the Bible: figuratively, as denoting existence which may have a beginning, but will have no end, e. g., angels, the human soul; literally, denoting an existence which has neither beginning nor ending, like that of God. Time has past, present, future; eternity has not. Eternity is infinite duration without any beginning, end, or limit—an ever abiding present. ”

“ The practical part of our religion is that which more particularly interests me. Still my mind reflects upon life, death, eternity, knowledge, wisdom, the expansion of the soul, and the knowledge of the Gods that are, that have been, and that are to be. What shall we say? We are lost in the depth of our own thoughts. Suppose we say there was once a beginning to all things, then we must conclude there will undoubtedly be an end. Can eternity be circumscribed? If it can, there is an end of all wisdom, knowledge, power, and glory—all will sink into eternal annihilation. ”

“ Duration and succession, eternity and time, are not identical. Duration is the continuance in existence of finite creatures, a continuance which is measured by the equable motion of planetary orbs, and imperfectly by phenomenal changes in our mental states. Succession is simply an order of phenomena, the recurrence, at regular or irregular intervals, of like changes, or the series of different states in the same existence. Time is a certain correlation of successive existences. Eternity is an attribute of the absolute Being—the timelessness of God. ”

“ To be touched by the Spirit of God, if but for a single moment, produces a million thrills of divine ecstacy, and so great is the joy that one short moment feels as if it were an eternity. In brief, when you are in that sublime state you are in real eternity; time passes no more; every moment appears to be an eternity because it is in eternity; and being in eternity it gives to you an eternity of bliss—unbounded bliss from the highest heaven. ”

“ But beyond all things here in this world, something further is always given. From nativity man comes to life; from life he goes to death—hence to the resurrection—then begins interminable life, from which there will be no exit, and, consequently, beyond which nothing is given. Therefore eternity itself is our last end, beyond which nothing remains. ”

“ That will live forever, when the stillness of death rests upon the pulses. That is the great connecting link between time and eternity, and doomed, by the order of nature, to live forever, and the boundless ages of eternity alone can fully develop its faculties, or define its station. ”

“ After death shall I live no more, and will no one even once think of me, since infinite time burieth all things in forgetfulness? Will it be even as though I had never been born? When was the world created, and what was in the beginning before the world? If the world was from all eternity, then it will always be ”

“ Because the idea of time has left my mind—if ever it had any hold on it—to me the man interred in the tumulus is living now as I live. We are both in eternity.
There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. ”

“ A hundred thousand million years, and ages will pass by, and your hell will be ever at its beginning. For what are a thousand years in comparison with eternity? Less than a day that has passed, " A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that it is past as a watch in the night." (Ps. xc. 4.) Do you wish to know what will be your home, which will receive you in eternity? ”

“ Whoever will seriously contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence, and the future eternity during which it will not be in existence, will see that it is essentially like a journey, in which the stages are represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days, and the steps by moments. ”

“ Every instant terminates a life and the next is a new birth. While each minute exists the past is dead and the future unmade. I speak here according to the knowledge of this world, but the truth is that there is no time, and that you are now what the Divine sees you—a ray of his splendour. ”

“ It would be well that all mortals should cease setting up milestones along the roadway of life. On our side of life there is only the ever present now. Why? Because, to a degree, spirits realize what mortal mind cannot grasp, the meaning of Eternity. ”

“ The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation—the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. ”

“ By eternity, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.
Explanation—Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and, therefore, cannot be explained by means of continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end. ”