Sunday School Notes and Comments

Our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has written (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 274): "Dear reader, right thinking, right feeling, and right acting—honesty, purity, unselfishness—in youth tend to success, intellectuality, and happiness in manhood. To begin rightly enables one to end rightly, and thus it is that one achieves the Science of Life, demonstrates health, holiness, and immortality." To make this right start now is all-important. Regular weekly attendance at Sunday school, together with study periods at home, is surely a modest contribution toward this end. To do this consistently requires strength of character, for error would try to keep pupils away—this being a form of animal magnetism to be recognized and dealt with. As pupils overcome the temptation to stay away from Sunday school, they develop the quality of trustworthiness that will go far toward enabling them later to rise to high achievement in worthy endeavors.

Teaching the elder pupils in the Christian Science Sunday School has brought the conviction that there is need of bringing to the pupils the realization that Christian Science is the revelation of Truth, and not "just another religious denomination." It is more necessary today than ever before that the teaching in our Sunday schools bring clearly to the consciousness of the pupils the greatness of the revelation of Christian Science, and its radical departure from human systems, theories, and philosophies.

Upon the pupils in the Sunday school today will largely rest the responsibility of tomorrow's work in our Christian Science churches. They will be members, workers, teachers, officers, Readers, and practitioner. Their development is going on now. Therefore, the present opportunity is to be used thoughtfully, for thus and thus only will each one demonstrate that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding."

Those who are engaged in teaching in the Sunday school have a great trust committed to their care. Those who undertake this work, having been led to undertake it by divine Principle, will not allow themselves to swerve from the line of duty by any subtle suggestion of error. Teachers in the Christian Science Sunday School are a Christian army, enlisted to overcome false material consciousness.

The Manual of The Mother Church by Mary Baker Eddy (Art. XX) is very definite about what we shall teach, and we are always safe in bringing to the pupils the understanding that every thought which declares God aright originates in God and has the power of God behind it.

The Christ shows forth the real man. Deliverance comes through spiritual enlightenment. This is true redemption. Is not spiritual enlightenment the purpose of Sunday school teaching?

"The instruction given by the children's teaches must not deviate from the absolute Christian Science contained in their textbook" (Church Manual, Art. XX, Sect. 3).

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