Article September 1, 1934 Issue

Choosing Our Friends

[Written Especially for Young People]

JANE W. MC KEE

Not least among the varied challenges that present themselves to the student in high school or college is the important and joyous task of making friends. Individual, group, club, and fraternity friendships, in one form or another, make their bid for attention. It has been wisely said that a man is known by the company he keeps, which goes to show how important are these periods at school when we place ourselves on trial before the campus, or look for those whom we wish to draw into our group. Better temporary isolation for a time than the trials resultant upon a hastily welded friendship. And what satisfaction and comfort we may always have in the close bond of friendship between ourselves and our heavenly Father!

Well may the youth reared in Christian Science express gratitude that in the Christian Science Sunday School he has received training which will help him in campus life. Following the first all-important groundwork, in the study of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer with its spiritual interpretation as found in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 16, 17), and the Beatitudes, the Sunday school pupil is taught how to study the Bible Lessons in the Christian Science Quarterly, with their intimate bearing on the problems of everyday life, and how to apply this wisdom to the meeting of his needs. This he learns to do through obedient application of Mrs. Eddy's instructions in Science and Health (p. 559) relative to assimilating the truth. There she says: "Take divine Science. Read this book from beginning to end. Study it, ponder it." The Sunday school student has learned that the attempt to "take divine Science" by merely reading about it will never satisfy his need or solve his problem. He has been taught how to study and ponder, that is, how to think and reason profoundly, how to meditate upon and examine what is read. Appreciation wells up within him as he ponders the insight which our beloved Leader showed in providing Article XX, Section 3, of the Church Manual, which says in part, "The next lessons consist of such questions and answers as are adapted to a juvenile class." He feels free to bring his questions to the class, and there he is encouraged to take them to God for solution, and learns that every question finds its right answer in divine Mind. As he studies and ponders the Lesson-Sermon, he finds that his questions during the week can be satisfactorily answered.

In a Christian Science Sunday School class a group of young women of advanced high school grade learned through questions and answers a vital lesson in friendship making. Included in the Lesson-Sermon for a particular Sunday was the story of Jesus teaching within a house, surrounded by Pharisees and doctors of the law who had come from the surrounding towns. Outside the house, a multitude was trying to get near. Luke directs our attention to a man, lying on a bed, the victim of paralysis (known in those days as palsy), borne by his friends.

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