Article November 20, 1915 Issue

"A little child"

ELIZABETH H. MURDOCK

When our consciousness has once been awakened to the spiritual facts of being, we find that many a little incident along the way becomes symbolic of an idea of Truth and teaches us valuable lessons. Not yet have we outgrown the need of just such teaching as Jesus gave to his disciples in his wayside parables, and also his object-lessons. One of the most important of these was given the disciples when the Master "called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them." An enlightened and uplifted thought follows now, as it did then, when the inner voice bids us pause to meditate upon some apparently trivial thing.

We have especial cause for rejoicing when the effect of such an experience tends toward the recognition of the simplicity of the teachings of Christian Science, for this is a much needed lesson. We often seem to feel that work in Christian Science is a very complicated matter, requiring an exhaustive knowledge of disease, its laws and manifestations, before we can even diagnose the trouble, and great skill in the application of the truth before we can meet it. This sense of things leaves us very much afraid that there may be some phase of error which we have omitted to consider in our work, or some aspect of truth, necessary to the healing, that we do not realize, with the result that we unconsciously arrive at a much greater reliance upon our own intellectual comprehension of both evil and good, and of the right methods of applying truth, than upon the omnipresence and omnipotence of God.

Nothing has ever spoken to me more clearly of the simplicity of truth and its application to human needs than a little incident that I witnessed while travelling last summer. Near us in the sleeping-car there sat a mother with her ten months' old baby, and I noticed that occasionally, as a little rest for them both, she would place the baby in the corner of the seat opposite her. Once she had just settled her there when I heard the roar of an approaching train which would pass close to the window where the child was sitting. The baby heard it too, drew back into the corner with a little shudder, and stared out of the window with wide, frightened eyes to see what the dreadful thing might be. It was only for a moment, however, that she did this, and then, just as one might have expected her to scream out in terror, with a visible effort she turned away from the window and looked up into her mother's face. While the train was passing, and it must have seemed a long time to her, for it did even to me, she never once wavered, but kept her eyes fixed steadily upon her mother's face. She not only did not allow herself to look for an instant at the thing that frightened her, but she was evidently filling her consciousness with the beloved mother-presence, and all the love and protection and good that it meant to her; and one could see from her face that she had found peace.

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