What an experience was offered to the group of people gathered in Tremont Temple, Boston, on March 16, 1885! Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, had been allowed just ten minutes to address another speaker's audience in reply to his public letter condemning her doctrines. For brevity's sake she posed and answered five short questions. To the question "Do I believe in a personal God?" she replied: "I believe in God as the Supreme Being. I know not what the person of omnipotence and omnipresence is, or what the infinite includes; therefore, I worship that of which I can conceive, first, as a loving Father and Mother; then, as thought ascends the scale of being to diviner consciousness, God becomes to me, as to the apostle who declared it, 'God is Love,'—divine Principle,—which I worship; and 'after the manner of my fathers, so worship I God.'" Miscellaneous Writings, p. 96;
How gently yet concisely Mrs. Eddy led her hearers to the dynamic concept of God and His creation that had been revealed to her as she studied the Scriptures. For Christian Science follows closely the inspired Word of the Scriptures, especially the teaching and works of Christ Jesus. The fatherhood and motherhood of God are clearly implied in the very first chapter of the Bible, in the spiritual record of creation, which declares, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Gen. 1:27;
Later, when Jesus summarized, in effect, the Ten Commandments by quoting the Mosaic law: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," Matt. 22:37-39; did some of his hearers perhaps glimpse the vital relationship between those two requirements? Only by honoring God as Father and Mother can we see ourselves and our neighbor rightly as His children, His spiritual ideas, and so love our neighbor as ourselves.
