WHEN Elijah restored to life the widow's son, as recorded in the seventeenth chapter of I Kings, we are told that the first thing he did was to say to the mother, "Give me thy son." In like manner when the metaphysical worker of today is called upon to heal a sick child, he begins by separating the child, in thought, from the belief of human parentage. "Give me thy son," is the eternal demand of Truth. Give up thy false belief in a material creation and a material creator, and place thy child unreservedly under the protecting care of its true Father–Mother, God. The narrative goes on to say that Elijah "took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he abode." In other words, the prophet carried the child, in thought, into that higher realm of spiritual consciousness where he himself dwelt, wherein man is ever recognized as the perfect expression of the perfect and changeless and ever present Life which is God. We are all familiar with the outcome, how "the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived," and how the prophet took him back again, "and delivered him unto his mother."
In this simple story of long ago there is a deep lesson for all of us, for there is perhaps no thought to which mortal mind clings with more insistence than the belief in human relationship and human dependence, not only between mother and child but between all those who are still wandering in this Adam–dream of a material existence. The whole fabric of society is one intricate network of tangled human relationships. We all seem to belong to each other, instead of to God. There are circles within circles, wheels within wheels. Each one of us is related not only to those in his immediate family, but to others as well, causing outlying and outreaching and remote relationships which one can no more trace to their logical conclusion than he can trace the ever widening circles caused by the dropping of a pebble upon some quiet pool. The result is that situations often arise wherein we find ourselves, as it seems, hopelessly involved, unable to live up to our highest ideals, motives, and aspirations by the constant interference, be it conscious or unconscious, of those whom the world calls our "nearest and dearest."
This state of affairs entered quite early into the world's history; in fact, it came in with the suggestion made to Adam that man was not already sufficient unto himself as God's reflection, but needed something more to make him perfect and complete. How disastrously this first belief in human relationship ended, we all know. The second was no better; for the belief in human parentage resulted in the belief in human brotherhood, and that ended in murder, for "Cain very naturally concluded that if life was in the body, and man gave it, man had the right to take it away" (Science and Health, p. 89). But this belief of human relationship seems to be here. What are we to do with it? Are we to repudiate it, label it "nothing," lay down every sweet human love, duty, obligation, and responsibility, and live, each of us alone, an isolated, useless, and unhappy family of one?
