Our Reading Rooms

ANDRÉE FINQUENEISEL

Throughout her writings our dear Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, many times emphasizes the need for all those who wish to demonstrate the rules of Christian Science healing to read, study, and ponder the Word of God, as found in the Bible and her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," as well as in all her other writings. On page 4 of "No and Yes" she makes this pertinent remark: "Reading Science and Health has restored the sick to health; but the task of learning Science of Mind-healing and demonstrating it understandingly had better be undertaken in health than sickness."

A public appreciation of Mrs. Eddy's wisdom in asking her students to study every day may be found on page 48 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany." It reads as follows: "Mrs. Eddy ... in her insistence upon the constant daily reading of the Bible and her own writings, ... has given to her disciples a means of spiritual development which ... will certainly build such truth as they do gain into the marrow of their characters. The scorn of the gross and sensual, and the subordination of merely material to spiritual values, together with the discouragement of care and worry, are all forces that make for righteousness. And they are burned indelibly upon the mind of the neophyte every day through its reading. The intellects of these people are not drugged by scandal, drowned in frivolity, or paralyzed by sentimental fiction."

In our own days more than ever before, when so many easily obtained material pleasures and frivolities seem to surround us, can we as students of Christian Science afford to forget our Leader's advice and neglect to tend our spiritual light in time of health, listening instead to the mental argument which would say that it is so difficult to find time for reading and serious thinking, or the quiet necessary for such study? Do we always remember that it is our duty daily to replenish, as it were, the lamp of our spiritual understanding if we wish to keep out of darkness? or do we procrastinate till we are forced through sickness or inharmony of some kind to find both the time and the quiet necessary to listen to and hear the "still small voice"?

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Our Reading Rooms

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access