“The vital part, the heart and soul of Christian Science, is Love,” Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 113). She could write that because she lived it, practiced it, and healed with it. She was a devoted student of the Bible, and through her study she had learned of this healing, protecting love, especially found in the life of Christ Jesus.
So not only was it natural, then, but absolutely necessary for the Church she founded, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, to be based on that divine Principle, Love. In the Church Manual, Mrs. Eddy makes Love (a synonym for God) the very foundation of the Church. Here are a few of the By-Laws she included: “In Science, divine Love alone governs man; . . .”; “[members] shall strive to promote the welfare of all mankind by demonstrating the rules of divine Love”; one By-Law is titled “Charity to All” (pp. 40, 45, 47).
I had an occasion to experience the love of this Church, The Mother Church, in a way that deepened my understanding of what it means to be a church member. The incident took place in 1968, when I was in the army in Vietnam (my testimony about this experience is in the October 20, 1980, Christian Science Sentinel). We had a communications site that was overrun and destroyed by the enemy. There were men in my platoon on that mountaintop, and I didn’t know if they’d survived the attack or not, so I was on one of the first helicopter flights of infantry reinforcements. We came into the landing zone with heavy supporting fire from helicopter gunships on either side of us, and US Air Force jets dropping 500-pound bombs over the other side of the mountain. The scene was very grim as bodies of American soldiers littered the landing zone. There was much work to be done to take care of the dead and wounded first, and then to assess the situation and how we could defend ourselves.
