A young man was brought before a judge in a court in a small western town. Asked why none of his family had come to help him, he replied that he had not notified them. "Have you a mother?" asked the kindly judge. And when an affirmative reply was given, he added: "Why, son, you should have told your mother. You know a mother's love can forgive anything." Mrs. Eddy, who understood mother-love so well, says in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 60): "A mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy, both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever difficulties." So Christian Scientists like to think of God as Mother as well as Father; for the word "mother" includes so much of hope and comfort, so much of tenderness and sweetness, so much of love and forgiveness.
Then, as children of God, we must reflect this mother-love. We need to remember this when handling church problems. One may come to us for opportunity to serve who, perhaps, has not always been all he should have been; and it takes tenderest mother-love to judge this one rightly and fairly. While active workers in the church should be selected with great wisdom, this caution is sometimes used by the adversary to foster, as Mrs. Eddy says in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 211), "suspicious distrust where honor is due." While "Saul" is not needed as a worker, "Paul" is. If we pray and strive for more of the Christ-mind, when we gain it we shall find that so much of tender mother-love has come with it that we shall know when "Saul" has become "Paul."
Suppose that in a garden one came across a rose tightly closed, without the slightest appearance of unfoldment, covered with an unseemly cobweb! "Well, it is not beautiful," you say; and it is passed by. But, later, a loving hand, maybe a gentle wind, or perhaps unfoldment causes the cobweb to fall away, and the rosebud unfolds into a beautiful, fragrant rose. Now, some one offers the rose to you. Do you refuse it? Do you remember its cobwebbed past? No; you accept it for what it now is.
