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.

The story of the creation of the so-called Adam-man, his fall, and the curse laid on him is continued in the story of the building of the tower of Babel. This tower of confusion, which was an attempt to build on a false basis, fell because of its own imperfection. And the story of mortals continues, with the added burden of confusion of tongues, racial animosities, warring temperaments, which would try to separate those endeavoring to carry out God's will. Out of the mist of ignorance, which ever tries to hide the real creation, come those supposed laws of so-called mortal mind, the nothingness of which divine Science reveals. Whatever is built on a false basis must perish, though personal sense would still build its Babel towers to confuse us, and would still try to separate those who should be working together. As we know that Adam is but a counterfeit of the real man, so the continued story of an Adam who builds a Babel tower of confusion on a false material sense of God and man, in belief also produces a counterfeit of man's relation to his brother man. This relationship to be right must not be on any false basis of mere personal attachment or animosity.

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