“Do you know,” said Bernard presently, “I sometimes think prophecy isn’t so strange a thing after all as most people think it. I really see no reason why any earnest man might not be able to foresee the future now and then in moments of exaltation.” “There’s reason enough to my mind,” I replied, “in the fact that future events do not exist as yet. We cannot know that which is not, though we may shrewdly guess it at times. But when we do, we are only arguing from known or suspected causes to their necessary consequences. And that is in no proper sense prophecy at all.” “Your argument is good enough, but the premises are bad, I think,” replied my friend, meditatively, his mouth wreathed with a smile, but his great sad eyes looking solemnly into mine. “How so?” I asked. “Why! I doubt the truth of your assumption that future events do not exist as yet.” “Well, go on; I’m ready to hear your explanation or your theory or whatever else it is,” said I, laughingly. “Oh, I don’t know that the idea is mine at all. I suppose that others have gone over the ground before me, though I think, perhaps, my application of the thought is new. What I have in mind is this: Past and Future are only divisions of TIME. They do not belong at all to Eternity. We, living in Time, cannot divest ourselves of its trammels. We cannot conceive of any event without assigning a Time relation to it; without investing it with the trammels and harness and paraphernalia of Time. To us every event must be Past, or Future, with reference to other events. But is there, in reality, any such thing as a Past or a Future? If there is any such thing as Eternity, it now is and always has been and ever must be. Time is a mere delusion: a false medium, through which we look at things askant. As there can be no such thing as Time in Eternity, there can be no such thing there as a Past or a Future event. If Eternity is anything more than Time exaggerated and extended,--if, indeed, there is any such thing as Eternity,--it is not subject to the laws and conditions of Time. There can be no Past and no Future there; but only an Eternal NOW. “The absolute truth is not that which we see through a distorting medium of Time, but that which we should see if we were in Eternity and freed from the illusions of Time. To beings who see thus clearly and truthfully, all things must exist in an eternal Present. All things that have been or shall be, _now are_. What we call ‘Memory,’ is only a mode of consciousness, and to know a Future event is a precisely similar mode of consciousness. Memory and prevision are only different ways of knowing a fact that now is. I see no reason to regard the one as any more truly impossible than the other.