SOME years ago some friends, students of Christian Science, were discussing our Wednesday evening meetings and the difficulties of giving a testimony. They admitted that the Church Manual stressed the importance of giving testimonies, and they wanted to be obedient but found it very hard to be so. In the midst of the conversation an older student who was present quoted to them Paul's words to the Galatians (5:7), "Who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?" Many times in the years that have followed, this citation has served to renew lagging efforts and inspire greater spiritual activity. Sometimes when beliefs of fear, apathy, or inertia would seem to paralyze the activities of good at our testimony meetings, it might be well to revaluate these meetings in terms of service to our Cause.
Shortly after our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, had established these testimony meetings, in a letter to The Mother Church (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 149) she spoke of them as follows: "Invite all cordially and freely to this banquet of Christian Science, this feast and flow of Soul. Ask them to bring what they possess of love and light to help leaven your loaf and replenish your scanty store. Then, after presenting the various offerings, and one after another has opened his lips to discourse and distribute what God has given him of experience, hope, faith, and understanding, gather up the fragments, and count the baskets full of accessions to your love, and see that nothing has been lost."
From the beginning of the movement, Mrs. Eddy established opportunities for giving, not only in our testimony meetings but in other church activities. In those early days it must have required a great deal of courage to identify oneself with a movement as unpopular as Christian Science, and to make any public statement as to its healing efficacy must have required the most Christlike affection and unselfed love. But today Christian Science is generally respected by both pulpit and press, and is apt to suffer more from popularity than from persecution. There may be a need also to protect our meetings from the voicing of present popular beliefs of mental science and human psychology, which, being based on the human mind, have nothing in common with pure Science, based on the divine Mind.
