Articles

It has been said that "all mankind love a lover. " We may safely add to this and say that all the world loves childhood.

" In the year 1866," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 107 of Science and Health, "I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science.

There are few who when reminded of the household adage, "Some are born great," have not mentally added, "Yes, and some are born good, too!" We read in the Bible of the colossal characters of patriarch, prophet, and apostle, and feel that in their spiritual development they are so far above the average mentality of ourselves and our immediate neighbors that one might as well try to compare, the lilies and orchids of the horticulturist's supreme skill with a cottager's row of carrots and onions. Suddenly, from some obscure mountain village, or emerging from some little crowded back street of a teeming city, comes one whose being is aflame with the immanence of God, and whose path in life henceforth is marked by special acts of self-sacrifice and by stupendous achievement.

Once a Christian Science student was heard to say that it sometimes seemed to him as if some who knew nothing of Christian Science, and did not even want to know anything of it, had an easier time and got along better than those who were making an honest effort to conform their lives to its teachings. He felt resentful over the struggles he was having, and was rebellious that the human situation which he deemed afflictive did not disappear from his experience; it did not seem "fair" to him, nor compatible with the teaching that God is Love.

In Christian Science we learn that through prayer man's unity with God is realized. Perplexed humanity, conscious of the feebleness of this realization, is continually crying out: Teach us how to pray.

History and tradition relate many interesting changes in human views respecting a future state of existence. The origin of belief in a realm of sorrow and suffering, anciently known as the nether regions, or sheol, is too remote to be distinctly traced, but it is clear that this belief was fixed in the thought of primitive peoples, who held that all humanity went to this region of despair after death and that punishment was there meted out in proportion to their shortcomings on earth.

Mankind has no greater need to-day than to learn the nature and power of God. St.

HE that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty," the psalmist declared; and in another psalm we read, "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. " In Christian Science we learn to grasp the practical significance of these inspired sayings of Holy Writ.

The spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer as given by our Leader (Science and Health, pp. 16, 17 ) thus defines the petition for daily bread: "Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections;" and if ever Christian Scientists needed grace for each day it is now, for on their thinking depends, to a much larger extent than they perhaps recognize, the form of the world which will presently emerge from the melting pot in which it is now seething.

The importance of the prophetic word is indicated by the fact that, it comprises about one fourth of the entire Scriptures, also by the Master's care in pointing to its fulfillment in his own experience and ministry. We have become, as a general rule, so accustomed to think of the prophecies as chiefly concerned with a remote past or a remote future, that we do not perhaps fully realize, in this connection, that our own time is to us the only connecting link between the past and the future, and therefore the most important period there now is.