Prophesying of the coming of Christ Jesus and drawing a picture of the care he should receive when a child, Isaiah wrote (Isa. 7:15), "Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good." But it could not have been of abundant material food that Isaiah spoke. He wrote of the nutriment of Truth which was to make the child strong and give him a clear moral sense to discern between good and evil, to choose the one and refuse the other. Later, in the epistle to the Hebrews (1:9) we read that the reason Jesus was anointed above his fellows was that he "loved righteousness, and hated iniquity." It is of the cultivation of this scientifically critical sense that Mary Baker Eddy spoke when she said (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 240), "I now repeat another proof, namely, that Christian Science is the higher criticism because it criticizes evil, disease, and death —all that is unlike God, good—on a Scriptural basis, and approves or disapproves according to the word of God."
To aid in developing this scientifically critical sense we should early teach the pupils in the Christian Science Sunday School to prove that God is good. We should give the children a Scriptural and scientific measuring rod with which in their daily life they may begin to measure human thought, refuse evil as worthless, unreal, and choose good as the only real. Thus they become scientifically discriminating, therefore surer in their convictions and actions, and learn to reflect good only.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are more easily recognized as standards for human conduct than many other passages in the Scriptures; but all the Scriptures may be used to develop and strengthen moral and spiritual sense. As the Bible is a book of ageless interest and unchanging applicability, it should be taught as a veritable handbook for present-day life; and this can be done only by relating its spiritual lessons to the solution of the pupils' current problems. These problems, though they are seemingly complex, are certainly no more so than were the problems which Moses had, or Jeremiah, or the three Hebrews, or Jesus.
