Article November 10, 1917 Issue

What Christian Science teaches with regard to human...

Judge Clifford P. Smith

Arcadia (Fla.) News

What Christian Science teaches with regard to human relationships is in full accord with the passages on this subject in the New Testament. It was not Mrs. Eddy but the apostle Paul who first spoke of marriage as only better than a worse condition. (See the seventh chapter of I Corinthians, especially verses 8 and 9.) It was not she but Jesus Christ who first spoke of marriage as belonging to a state of existence lower than the highest. (See Luke xx. 27-38.) So also with regard to divine relationships, it was not Mrs. Eddy but the Master himself who first said, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." She was the first to teach fully or explicitly the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God.

Speaking of marriage, Mrs. Eddy has said on page 52 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "To be normal, it must be a union of the affections that tends to lift mortals higher." Again, she has said on page 56 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "Marriage is the legal and moral provision for generation among human kind;" and on page 68 of the same book she declared her disagreement with the belief that nonsexual reproduction applies to the human species. Although Mrs. Eddy accepted the Scriptural account of the immaculate conception of Jesus, she has spoken of him as "the only immaculate" (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 8), and no loyal Christian Scientist ever claimed to have given birth to a child without a human father. Christian Science neither teaches that a physical union is a heavenly relation, nor that the kingdom of heaven can be entered by celibacy. In a moral and spiritual manner it separates the grosser from the purer aspects of marriage, and lifts up the Christ-ideal of which Paul spoke when he said, "There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." God hath joined together the various qualities which constitute completeness, and no one who understands these could wish to put them asunder. The article on wedlock and the chapter on marriage in the above mentioned books, and all of Mrs. Eddy's writings upon this subject, are calculated to teach an enlightened Christian concept of marriage, and to show how it may promote human progress when it approximates spiritual unity, of which it is at best a symbol. The aptness of her writings for this purpose should be evident to any unbiased reader.

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