LOVE FOR OUR CHILDREN

CHARLES HENRY GABRIEL

What a load of personal responsibility and anxiety is lifted from the Christian Science parent who humbly accepts the fact revealed by Mary Baker Eddy that man has only one Father-Mother, who is God. In "Retrospection and Introspection" she writes (p. 22). "The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created through the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his brethren are all the children of one parent, the eternal good." It would be presumptuous to fear for the well-being of God's perfect child.

But you may ask. How can we be free from fear for our children when there seems to be danger at every turn, temptation lurking at every corner? The answer is that we must elevate our concept of children above mortal belief to the spiritual sense given in Mrs. Eddy's definition of "children" in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." There she writes (p. 582): "Children. The spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love." A spiritual idea cannot be tempted by evil, and no mortal beliefs of contagion, sin, sickness, or accident can touch or attach themselves to a representative of Life, Truth, and Love. Since man is the creation of God, he inherits only what God gives him. Because God is Life. His child inherits eternal being, free from accident or destruction; because God is Mind. His child inherits wisdom and intelligence; because God is Principle, His child expresses invariable obedience to God's law; because God is Spirit, His child sees himself as spiritual.

God's child is the only child there really is. We could never fear for our child if we maintained this true concept of him. With this proper sense of children as God's ideas, could we ever find ourselves attaching to our children unlovely dispositions, dishonest tactics, sensual inclinations, physical or mental deficiencies, and tracing these undesirable qualities to similar characteristics which may have been expressed in a human parent, relative, or ancestor? It is only when we are believing in a mortal sense of child, humanly created, that we become fearful, for indeed this counterfeit "man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble" (Job 14:1).

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