What can be said of coldness in the church, lack of caring, lack of spiritual affection?
Do we rejoice spontaneously over the warmth and love we find in our church body? Or do we have cause for sadness?
Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, was outspoken on this subject after addressing a communion service in The Mother Church in 1896. With compassionate realism she wrote to friends, "I find the general atmosphere of my church as cold and still as the marble floors." And she commented in another note: "My students are doing a great, good work and the meeting and the way it was conducted rejoices my heart. But O I did feel a coldness a lack of inspiration all through the dear hearts (not for me, Oh no, they are loyal to the highest degree) but it was a stillness a lack of spiritual energy and zeal I felt." Quoted in Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 97.
