The student of the Bible cannot help being impressed with the great love our Master and Way-shower, Christ Jesus, had for children. His whole teaching and his marvelous demonstrations of Truth were for the purpose of revealing the kingdom of heaven on earth, where men appeared to have lost sight of it. His comparison of the kingdom of heaven to little children is a remarkable and beautiful tribute to the purity and innocence of the child thought, and it also points to the simplicity of that state of consciousness where evil and sin are unknown—the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven.
Like our Master, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, loved little children, and she saw the importance of protecting the budding child thought from being contaminated by that which has no reality—the carnal mind—which bases all its deductions on the hypothesis that matter is an entity and possesses power for good and evil. In her dedicatory sermon to The Mother Church Mrs. Eddy pays this glowing tribute (Pulpit and Press, p. 9): "Ah, children, you are the bulwarks of freedom, the cement of society, the hope of our race!" And when she established The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, she made it clear that an important part of this Church is the Sunday school, where children from the tiny tots up to the age of twenty shall be taught the Holy Scriptures in their spiritual significance. From this groundwork the child may proceed to build that house "not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (II Cor. 5:1) for which we all long.
The Scriptures abound in simple and beautiful illustrations of divine Love made practical in the lives of mortals, and the child thought grasps the spiritual meaning of these readily. The story of Samuel, for instance; listening to the voice of God while he served Eli in the temple, is one that makes a lasting impression on the young Sunday school pupil and teaches him a lesson in receptivity and willing obedience to the law of God. Likewise, the story of Joseph brings home the fact which Paul puts into a few words when he says (Rom. 8:28), "All things work together for good to them that love God."
