Article May 18, 1963 Issue

Our Impersonal Pastor Answers Pupils' Questions

A teacher in a branch church Sunday School writes that the wisdom of the requirement in the Manual of The Mother Church by Mary Baker Eddy (Art. XX, Sect. 2), "The Sabbath School children shall be taught the Scriptures, and they shall be instructed according to their understanding or ability to grasp the simpler meanings of the divine Principle that they are taught," has been proved many times in her class. When a question has been raised, a verse in the Bible has often answered it to the pupil's complete satisfaction. Frequently, the pupil has found the answer in the current Lesson-Sermon, outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly.

An instance of this occurred when a class was reviewing the Responsive Reading, which was from Job. None of the pupils knew much about the story of Job; so the teacher took the opportunity to give them a brief summary of the book and read short passages. The pupils' interest was aroused when they saw that it was Job's belief in evil as a reality which had produced the sense of suffering and that it was Elihu's clear vision of the perfection and allness of God that led Job to recognize and then to accept this spiritual fact to be the truth of being, which brought about a healing.

On reading the verses, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (38:4, 7), one pupil exclaimed that these verses answered her question, "How did God create the universe?" She saw that creation is spiritual and not material, that man is forever at one with the Father, and that there never is a moment when God is without His reflection, man and the universe. Passages in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy were found which corroborated this, including the one on page 502, lines 24—27.

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