IN the Hebrew tent of meeting, the tabernacle in the wilderness established by Moses and later embodied in the temple, there stood inside the Holy Place the table of shewbread. The table held twelve loaves of unleavened bread. The book of Leviticus gives this rule regarding it (24: 5,6): "Thou shalt take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes thereof: two tenth deals shall be in one cake. And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure table before the Lord." As the manna had sustained the children of Israel in the wilderness, so this table of bread symbolized for generations to come the ever-presence of spiritual sustenance. One Bible commentary says of the shewbread, "It was an acknowledgment that man owes his 'daily bread' to God."
Centuries later, the master Christian, Christ Jesus, taught his followers to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matt. 6:11). Breaking bread with his disciples, he reminded them again and again of the ever-present sustaining, healing Christ, Truth.
Through the listening thought of a consecrated woman in search of the bread of Life, came in our time the revelation of the Science of the Christ. After her monumental discovery in 1866, Mrs. Eddy devoted nearly half a century to making this Science available to all mankind for all time. Seeing the need for the education of each individual in the knowledge of God and of man's relationship to Him, she provided the weekly Bible Lessons. These lessons in the Christian Science Quarterly, consisting of carefully selected citations from the Bible and their correlative passages from Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, may well be the world's most widely read study course.
