Article August 5, 1944 Issue

Governing the Body

[Of Special Interest to Children]

VELMA LEWIS INGRAHAM

Johnnie had always assumed that all grown people could drive an automobile, and he expected to drive one too when he became a little bigger. It seemed a very simple and natural thing to do. An automobile, he understood, was made for use and for pleasure, and the driver was its master. The driver could back the car out of the garage, drive it to the street, and then in any direction he cared to go. When he wished to stop, he simply did so, and let the car wait until he was ready to drive farther. It never occurred to Johnnie that the automobile could have any ideas or will of its own, or that it could dictate terms to the driver.

But in the block in which Johnnie lived was a man who had not until recently attempted to drive a car. Now he owned a shining new one and was trying to learn to drive it, but somehow driving did not seem so simple to him. One day he stalled his car right in front of Johnnie's home. He was so bothered that Johnnie's mother went out to see if she could help him. Johnnie listened in astonishment to their conversation. It seemed that the man was afraid of the automobile; he didn't feel at all that he was master of it. In fact, he seemed to believe the automobile could control him. Every time he attempted to drive it he thought the car was going to do something he did not want it to do. Johnnie's mother explained to the neighbor how important it was for him to realize first of all that he was absolute master of the car; that it could not do one thing he did not order it to do. She showed him a little more about the mechanical processes of driving; then she urged him to take control of the car with confidence, knowing that through intelligence he governed its entire course.

Afterwards Johnnie talked a great deal to his mother about this incident, and they discovered an interesting parallel in it to something they had been reading from "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. Turning to page 393 of that book, his mother read aloud: "Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man." Surely Mrs. Eddy meant that one should take possession of and govern his body just as he would take possession of and govern any useful machine.

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