Editorials

It is a great day for a new student of Christian Science when he joins a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, for the first time. It is a great day for the membership.

Each year pupils of a teacher of Christian Science meet primarily to be addressed by their teacher or, in his absence, by one they have chosen to conduct the meeting. It is a day of spiritual feasting.

The important item on the agenda was the election of a disciple to take the place of Judas Iscariot. There were about one hundred and twenty Christians present at that meeting in the upper room where the eleven lived, and they all, both men and women, prayed.

Christian Science can spring the trap of sensual indulgence. It shows the way of escape from all forms of addiction, whether to heroin, tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, masturbation, or just plain overeating.

To end a war or to prevent one, to clean up earth's air and water, to make our cities increasingly livable, to give whites and blacks, rich and poor, equal education, equal opportunity, and equal justice, to prevent disease and to find cures for the so-called incurable ones—these are but a few of the problems that have seemed to defy solution. Some people advocate revolutionary changes.

Christian Science shows us that God's perfect spiritual creation is not static, not rigid, not set up at some point in time. In reality you and I and the universe are the eternally unfolding conceptions of the infinite I AM, sustained and renewed by Him moment by moment as He knows us.

Strict rules govern the practice of Christian Science, and a practitioner is faced with a serious penalty for deviating from them — he will lose the power to heal. Success in the Christ method of healing has always been subject to wholehearted faith in Truth and uncompromising fidelity to the rules of divine Principle.

Giving human advice on sex from the standpoint of Christian Science is like steering between Scylla and Charybdis. If we encourage sexual relationships at all, we appear to be approving of pleasure in matter.

It is true that Christ Jesus said, "They which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage. " But this does not mean that he dismissed matrimony as unnecessary or undesirable as a human institution.

Nothing will more quickly develop one's capacity to give good Christian Science treatments than to actually give them, and to keep on giving them. The more consistently one maintains a conscious unity with God, perfect divine Mind, and persistently applies this true sense to the varied problems of human life, the quicker he will become an effective practitioner of this Science.