Having attended the Christian Science Sunday School from the earliest possible age, I learned to love the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3–17). One Sunday School teacher gave us the assignment of memorizing those rather daunting words. Daunting, because the English language was new to me. But I enjoyed the work of committing the Commandments to memory and took each one to heart, even though their deep meaning eluded me at first.
While the Commandments are often thought of as a list of prohibitions, a poet once called them “the rules of happiness” (Neil Millar, Ideas on Wings, “Ballade for the Commandments,” p. 7).
Through the years, as spiritual understanding grew and climbed beyond the literal meaning of these rules, I grasped something of Mary Baker Eddy’s first tenet of the Church of Christ, Scientist: “As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 497). I was satisfied that I was holding to the inspired Word of the Scriptures and obeying the Commandments to the best of my understanding.
