Article December 16, 1922 ISSUE

True Friendship

ETHEL MUNRO GOSS

If we are faithful to the teaching of Christian Science, we must be gaining steadily in tolerance, compassion, and tenderness. Through a higher understanding of God as Love, and a deeper comprehension of the needs of our fellowmen, there is awakened in us a kinship for all that is beautiful and true, and a growing sense of the unreality of all that is sordid, base, and untrue. In the more than glimpses of reality which the understanding of Christian Science brings us, we gain a warm and generous appreciation of the good expressed through individuals, —the compassion of motherhood, clear-eyed purity, steadfast integrity. We thus learn to reverence the beauty and perfection of divine Mind. But humanity has been so accustomed to think of good and evil as personal, that in breaking away from these old fetters it sometimes becomes confused.

We are learning that we can always turn to our Church Manual for a safe rule to guide us in any human experience; and in Article VIII, Section 1, Mrs. Eddy warns us against two forms of personal sense which would try to creep into all human relationships. This By-law reads in part, "Neither animosity nor mere personal attachment should impel the motives or acts of the members of The Mother Church." It is the failure to understand and obey this By-law which causes us sometimes to miss the friendship of that which is beautiful and true in man.

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