Article April 5, 1947 Issue

Our Reading Rooms

"No objectionable pictures"

As part of her prayerful work for the Reading Room one day, a librarian gave deep consideration to the following By-Law which appears in the Church Manual by Mary Baker Eddy (Art. XXV, Sect. 7): "No objectionable pictures shall be exhibited in the rooms where the Christian Science textbook is published or sold. No idle gossip, no slander, no mischief-making, no evil speaking shall be allowed."

Why had our Leader included the first sentence of this By-Law? The librarian could hardly imagine anyone wanting to display objectionable pictures in the Publishing House or in a Reading Room. Prayer revealed to her that idle gossip, slander, mischief-making, and evil speaking may constitute the basis for some of the objectionable pictures which our Leader expects us to eliminate through daily prayerful metaphysical work, which alone can rule them out of thought and experience.

She realized that pictures obtain in thought and must be corrected there. If those who appear to be sick, unhappy, despairing, lonely, or critical come into the Reading Room, and the librarian accepts as real these false pictures of man, then she is allowing in her own consciousness an exhibit of "objectionable pictures." She determined then and there to keep the perfect man of God's creating, the spiritual, real man, so consciously before her thought that she could accept no evidence of material-mindedness as real. Her position as librarian in a Christian Science Reading Room demanded that she do so.

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