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Loving the children

A Christian Science perspective.

  • By the editors of the Christian Science Sentinel

One day when Mary Baker Eddy went to a church where seamstresses plied their work, she saw a “little blind black girl sitting in the corner, where her mother would put her.” Mrs. Eddy spoke gently to the child and taught her the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. The next day she returned and asked the girl to repeat them. Later, the girl told a Christian Scientist that this time she “just felt enveloped in God’s great Love – and to a degree this sense of His ever-present Love has never left her.

“As she and her mother walked home that evening – she began to see – for the first time in her life.” Later, she became a lifelong student of Mrs. Eddy’s textbook on Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (see Joyce Ann Petit Reminiscence, “In my True Light and Life: Mary Baker Eddy Collections,” pp. 514-515).

“God’s great Love” is the power that not only opens physically blinded eyes, it also opens the eyes of evil-doers and enables them to change their ways (consider the change in Paul’s life when he saw Christ). It gives deliverance to captives, as witnessed by three Hebrew men saved from the fiery furnace. This is the power behind the prayers for abducted children in places such as Nigeria and Congo.

Christly prayer also includes those who hold them hostage and insists that evil cannot mesmerize anyone into actions that are contrary to God’s law. As Mrs. Eddy says, “Evil is not supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the so-called laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit secondary” (Science and Health, p. 207).

The spiritual thinker cannot be intimidated by the belief that the betterment of humanity is impossible. This message puts that lie to rest: “Innocence and Truth overcome guilt and error” (Science and Health, p. 568).

Innocence and Truth are forever united with the one divine Mind. And divine intelligence is well able to defeat mortal mind by virtue of this spiritual fact: The only intelligent Mind is the divine. Mortal mind is powerless in the face of Truth. Our insistence on Mind’s love for all its ideas will, through Christ, ultimately defeat whatever would oppose it. Or as Zechariah put it, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). This is the spirit of Love, which reveals each individual’s spirituality and drives out violence and cruelty.

Each spiritual thinker and pray-er has the power to make a difference in the world. In “Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896,” Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Beloved children, the world has need of you, – and more as children than as men and women: it needs your innocence, unselfishness, faithful affection, uncontaminated lives” (p. 110).

Watching and praying in this way enables us to redeem the times and to bless the world’s children with the reality of uncontaminated innocence.

From an editorial in the Christian Science Sentinel.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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