Sunday School Notes and Comments

Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us on page 470 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that "man is the expression of God's being." Our children need to be helped to gain this true sense of being, and to realize it as their own true selfhood. The best form of protection from erroneous belief of every kind is the abiding consciousness that the allness of divine Love makes unreal any other claim to being; that there is no life or consciousness but that which is "the expression of God's being." The children can be taught to know as real only that which God knows, and to see as He sees, because man is the reflection of God.

This is the standard which should be set before our Sunday school children. Christian Science should open for them the door upon the radiant universe of God's ideas, and enable them joyously to explore its infinite possibilities.

The Word, containing the seed within itself, unfolds continuously in the child's consciousness from the moment he realizes his true selfhood to be "the expression of God's being," and it uncovers to him progressively the nothingness of anything and everything that does not conform to the absolute standard of Truth set before him in Christian Science. God's ideas alone possess vitality and power.

Many teachers are finding that the use of assignment slips provides a practical, interesting way in which questions based on the Lesson-Sermons in the Christian Science Quarterly may be presented to the pupils.

The working out of the questions must, of course, be the demonstration of the individual teacher, but it is well to ask questions which, in accordance with our Leader's instructions, are "adapted to a juvenile class" (Church Manual, Art. XX, Sect. 3), and to word them in such a way that they will be thought-provoking. The questions can be made so arresting that the pupil will eagerly look up the references and study the entire Lesson to gain more information. Questions bringing out the relation of the Golden Text and Responsive Reading to the Lesson are important.

One of the satisfactory results from this practice has been that the questions assigned on the slips have helped the pupils to learn to study the Lesson. Formerly, it was easy to read the Lesson quickly, remembering a little of it in order to talk about it on Sunday mornings, but without really making a study of it. Many times this was not because the pupil did not want to study the Lesson, but because he did not know how to do so.

The success of our Sunday schools is measured by the lives of both teachers and pupils. May our children grow in stature and "in favour with God and man," as did the child Jesus, and continue "till," as Paul said, "we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

If the current Lesson in the Christian Scicncc Quarterly is thoroughly studied before coming to the class, unfoldment will take place which will prompt the best questions. The teacher who is thus inspired will present the lesson in so interesting a manner that the pupils will be eager both to listen and to answer. Good teaching is a matter of individual demonstration.

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