EXPERIENCE of personal loneliness is dreaded in the ratio that each one prizes personal companionship. Humanity universally reaches out for congenial associations and friendships, and human happiness is believed to depend largely upon the fulfilment of that desire. Therefore the question asked on page 266 of Science and Health touches each one closely: "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank?" Assuming an affirmative reply, Mrs. Eddy continues, "Then the time will come when you will be solitary."
This passage has probably caused some inquiry and misgiving on the part of the young student. Why, he asks, should one be deprived of personal friends? or, what has personal friendship to do with one's Christianity? According to the accepted translation, Jesus put the case even more emphatically when he declared that if one "hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, ... he cannot be my disciple." Evidently there is something wrong with human relationships, and that is, they rest upon a material instead of a spiritual sense of things; and as personal, material sense does not express the truth about man, it cannot be the true foundation for friendship and love. The personal senses cognize only what is transitory and corruptible, and those who cling to these senses as expressing the reality of life might well echo Job's words, "I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister." In the same mournful strain the psalmist cried out: "I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people."
It is the truth about man, and not an arbitrary decree, which demands that a false sense of man shall be given up. Jesus replaced the belief of human parentage with the truth that man proceeds from God alone; that God hath "crowned him with glory and honor," and made him to have dominion over the works of His hands. On the same spiritual basis Christian Science is designed to purify all human relationships, retaining whatever is good and helpful, but casting out the jealousy and disappointment, the selfishness and faithlessness and folly that have ever marked human associations. Does not human society manifest its profound need of this moral and spiritual liberation?
