In her autobiography, "Retrospection and Introspection," Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 80), "There are no greater miracles known to earth than perfection and an unbroken friendship." Truly, Mrs. Eddy was a friend to all mankind, for through her endeavors thousands have been liberated from sin, disease, death, and errors of every name and nature. She knew what Christ Jesus meant when he said (John 15:13), "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." And she did so surrender the material sense of life and its pursuits that she was able to give to all mankind a spiritual sense of life and its everlasting joys.
Friendship is perhaps the most sought-after relationship between individuals. Many hunger for it longingly because they do not know its real nature. They believe it to be something apart from themselves that must be bestowed upon them by someone else, whereas friendship exists within man, and the miracle of divine Love brings it forth to bless all those within its radiance. Mankind says that friendship is humanly bestowed or withheld, but this is not true. It is a right idea included within man, who embodies all right ideas. Thus, friendship is always present with the real man, for God, divine Love, whom man reflects, is omnipresence.
Mrs. Eddy's interpretation of the word miracle lifts the word from one of mystery and uncertainty to a new understanding when she defines a miracle as "that which is divinely natural, but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 591). Then, if continued friendship is a miracle, it is divinely natural; as natural to man as is his life, which comes from God and includes all good. Man would be incomplete without friendship, for he is the expression of divine Love and can never stop being a complete expression.
