Christianity is, always, the redemption of a point, of one particular point. “Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.” In this sense there is nothing but now; there is no duration. We have nothing to do with duration, and yet (being mortal) we have to do with nothing but duration; between those contrasts also all the history and doctrine of Christendom lies.

Immediacy and devotion, which created that lost experiment, had marked the existence and spread of the church everywhere. The Epistles of Saint Paul carry that now to the highest point of exploration and of expression. But already in the Epistles themselves something else has come in. “It is!” they said, but then they had to go on saying “It is!” Time existed, and time itself had, as it were, to be converted, to be rededicated towards the thing out of time. Not only so, but it had to be converted in the case of every individual Christian. 

If salvation is now, what do we do with time?