Thanks to Mary Baker Eddy's discovery of the unchanging spiritual laws underlying the teachings and healing works of Christ Jesus, in some families today four and five generations have been living witnesses to the reliability and effectiveness of the operation of God's healing law in their lives. Although at times in her career Mrs. Eddy, who founded Christian Science, encountered resistance and misunderstanding from others, including some of her closest relatives, she never wavered in her love for her own family, helping them any way she could, or in her love for the larger family of mankind. "Whoever opens the way in Christian Science," she writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn." Science and Health, p. 174 And in the Bible we find the promise that God's influence and power will extend "from generation to generation."
There may be times, however, when we feel a tension between our deep desire to work out our salvation from sin, sickness, and mortality through spiritual means alone and our duties and relationships to family members who don't appear to be so inclined. What are we to do? Giving up our deepest convictions isn't the answer. What we may need most is a more spiritual, inclusive, and universal vision of each family member, no matter what the relation or generation.
In line with the Bible teaching that man is made in the likeness of God, immortal Spirit, Christian Science explains that man's existence must be something other than a short chronological span of physical life. A sentence in Science and Health helps to turn our thought to the incorporeal and eternal nature of God's offspring: "When spiritual being is understood in all its perfection, continuity, and might, then shall man be found in God's image." Ibid., p. 325 By his remarkable healing works, Jesus showed the practical effects that come from identifying others as the creation of an all-good God, who makes and permits nothing unlike His own nature.
