Articles

The mental atmosphere in Boston's Tremont Temple on March 16, 1885, would likely have been daunting to most speakers trying to explain what must have seemed a very different way of being a Christian. The thoughts of the nearly three thousand attendants ranged from benignly curious to highly skeptical to openly hostile.

It is the summer of 1866. A boy waits for his mother on Lynn Beach, Massachusetts, while she hitches their horse and goes for water.

Have you ever felt stalled? Sometimes it's not clear what steps to take in solving a problem. Sometimes, even though lots of steps have been taken, they don't appear to lead anywhere.

Recurring specters of unhappy memories challenge many individuals in their private lives; but such specters are not always personal. The conscience of this century is perplexed by the recollection of certain historical events that seem too horrible to contemplate.

The human mind's almost habitual mode of reasoning takes for granted that we have an internal mental world and look out upon an external physical world. The human mind assumes that our consciousness is in our body, not the other way about—that the fleshly body is actually in human consciousness.

Why would a person want to share a book with the world, if doing so means losing one's high standing in society and possibly even being accused of being insane? Why would someone want to share the ideas in that book if it would mean having to accept transient accommodations and homelessness instead of a free, secure house provided by a wealthy sister? Choosing to ignore such dire predictions and to bear such unjust humiliation are just two examples of the difficult choices Mary Baker Eddy faced when she accepted her calling to be author of a book essential to the world's salvation. To friends and intellectual critics alike, the aspiration to write, publish, and distribute Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was a venture inevitably doomed to failure, and one that promised nothing but ridicule for its author.

It has been a century since Mary Baker Eddy ordained the Bible and her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as pastor over the Church of Christ, Scientist; and a half century since the pastor first began healing me. In World War II, these two books accompanied me overseas on a crowded troopship through submarine-infested waters.

Have you ever compared the life of a Christian to that of a soldier? Until recently, I never had. In fact, I really pictured the two as complete opposites.

All too often people express dismay because they wish they could eat certain foods but believe they can't, for fear of digestive troubles. To digest the God-revealed truths of Christian Science, and thereby gain a spiritual understanding of the creator and His creation, can make a distinct difference in the degree of harmony we express in daily living, and can even help in relation to digestion of the food set before us.

While he was Mayor of New York City, the colorful Ed Koch, following the accomplishment of something productive for the city, would often ask the reporters at a press conference, "How'm I doing?" He was always expecting the answer to be "Great!" Recently, I thought of applying the question to myself in regard to my practice of Christian Science. How'm I doing? I've been studying the Bible and the works of Mary Baker Eddy a long time.