Once when I was flying back to Boston from London, the plane came in low from the south and we had an extraordinarily clear view of The Mother Church. The Church from this perspective appeared so established that I had the feeling it had been there forever. I knew, of course, that the Original Mother Church had only been completed in 1894, less than one hundred years ago. Yet I got a sudden intuitive glimpse from that aerial view that Church has a natural and inevitable role to play in the life of the community, embracing all the people and caring especially about children. This is not surprising, since Mrs. Eddy built her Church on a spiritual foundation—on the rock, Christ. She saw that its divine purpose is to reinstate Christ Jesus' teaching and healing work for everyone.
The biographies of Mrs. Eddy's life and the book Building of The Mother Church tell us something of the events that took place at that time of growth in our Church's history. It looked as if everything "the carnal mind" could imagine was being used to prevent the actual church building from going up. Mrs. Eddy understood it was resistance to Christ, Truth—or unhandled animal magnetism—that was hindering the work. Time and again she would urge her faithful students to go forward in spite of what seemed to be insuperable difficulties.
Mrs. Eddy was constantly reminding Christian Scientists that the Church must be understood in broad, spiritual terms. For instance, referring to May 21, 1894, the day the foundation stone was laid, she said, "To-day I pray that divine Love, the life-giving Principle of Christianity, shall speedily wake the long night of materialism, and the universal dawn shall break upon the spire of this temple. The Church, more than any other institution, at present is the cement of society, and it should be the bulwark of civil and religious liberty."Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 144–145. Mrs. Eddy knew that the practice of Christian Science healing, so central to her Church, would benefit the whole community.
