Article November 22, 1919 Issue

Proving God

MARY DYER LEMON

It was in a high school room during her first year of teaching in a small town that the writer began to put into practice the truth she was learning in Christian Science. The physical trouble for which she had turned to Science for help had no doubt been aggravated by the great sense of responsibility and fear of failure which she was entertaining. This condition of thought was uncovered, and she began to see how her trouble was wholly a result of wrong thinking.

In spite of the new light that Christian Science was throwing upon everything, however, she could not help feeling, being fresh from college, that the many theories learned there—conflicting though they were—should be of some service to her, and she determined to try them out. Full of the mesmerism of false education, to her Christian Science seemed too simple. Surely it could not cover the vast amount of ground that psychology and pedagogy included in all their phases. She told the practitioner about her problems of discipline and teaching. He explained that God was the Teacher and His perfect child the pupil. But mortal mind argued, "What could a man like this, who before taking up the study of Christian Science had had no intellectual advantages, know about the difficulties of a schoolroom?" Then followed weeks of experimenting—only to end in failure and disappointment. There was an almost continual state of confustion and mutiny throughout the room. She had interviewed other teachers, and had applied their methods, one after another, but without avail. The spirit of the room became worse instead of better.

All this she told the kind practitioner with tears of discouragement rolling down her face. "Have you ever tried loving?" he asked, after patiently listening to her story. She admitted that she had not. "But how could one love unlovely girls and boys?" she thought as she looked over the schoolroom the next day. Many of them were from factory homes, with no manners or even cleanliness in some cases. To her unloving nature it did not seem necessary to love such as these. All day long the practitioner's words kept singing themselves in her heart, "Did you ever try loving?" But the same inharmonious conditions continued to reign.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Poem

The Evening and the Morning