A child who had been reared in the comforting teaching of Christian Science became very ill. A practitioner was called to help, but the little one did not respond to treatment at once. The mother's thought was bound with fear. In her endeavor to free herself and her daughter, the mother said, "Dear, don't forget that you were God's child before you were mine." The answer came clearly, "I was always God's child." The child's insistence on what she had learned in the Sunday school of the loving Father-Mother God and His one universal family of ideas, rebuked the doubt and fear, completely breaking the mesmerism of the mother's anxiety. The Christ, always present to heal, commanded the situation. Confidence returned to the mother's heart, and soon the normal, happy state of health was manifested.
"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God," said Jesus. How patiently and firmly the Master endeavored to show the necessity for a childlike spirit, pointing his followers to the great truth that all God's children have one Father, express the divine nature, and are governed by Love alone! And how slow even his apostles were to grasp the meaning of his wondrous words, although they were always accompanied by the positive proof that his way was the way of Life, Truth, and Love! As at that period, so today this teaching is demonstrable and simple. It seems complicated only because mortals do not readily admit the fact of man's eternal unity with his Maker.
Mary Baker Eddy writes (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 189), "The meek Nazarene's steadfast and true knowledge of preexistence, of the nature and inseparability of God and man,—made him mighty." She also writes (ibid., p. 181), "Mortals will lose their sense of mortality—disease, sickness, sin, and death—in the proportion that they gain the sense of man's spiritual preexistence as God's child; as the offspring of good, and not of God's opposite,—evil, or a fallen man." We cannot make the false concept of man into a semblance of perfection. So-called life in matter is an illusion of the material senses. And have we not found them to be unreliable, when reason has been rightly used, and can there be trust in that which may utterly mislead us?
