Article March 3, 1917 Issue

Teaching the "first lessons"

ROSE A. LILLY

In the Manual of The Mother Church (Art. XX, Sect. 3) we read in regard to teaching in the Sunday school, "The first lessons of the children should be the Ten Commandments (Exodus, 20:3–17), the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13), and its Spiritual Interpretation by Mary Baker Eddy, Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3–12)." These first lessons are not only first chronologically in the Sunday school work, but first in importance, for it is apparent that if they are thoroughly understood and lived, man's whole duty to God, and therefore to himself and his fellow men, would be fulfilled.

It was found by one Sunday school teacher that the children were reciting their concept of the spiritual meaning of the commandments and beatitudes very much as they were reciting the commandments and beatitudes themselves, and it became her constant endeavor to make these lesson more practical and vital to each pupil. Among other methods employed, the children were counseled to observe in their study of the Lesson-Sermon the places where the different meanings of the commandments and beatitudes are brought out; for thereby many helpful lights are thrown on these lessons as they are presented from different angles.

One of the first things to be impressed upon the children in the study of the commandments is the fact that they are law and therefore mean protection; that they are not negative, but positive. They are not a list of things which a normal person would like to do but cannot. They are positive statements of law which govern and protect man; and since the real man, or God's idea, is governed by the law of God, it follows that disobedience to God's commandments or laws by the real man is an impossibility. Just as the people of a community are governed and protected by the laws of that community, though they may be more or less ignorant of what those laws are, so are God's children governed and protected by divine law, even though they may not be fully consciousness of this law or its operation. It is only the counterfeit, abnormal sense which would break the commandments, and it is the mortal concept of man which suffers therefrom.

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