Childlike Qualities

[Excerpts from a Workshop Meeting]

In a message to church members (see Miscellaneous Writings, p. 110) our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, points to qualities which the world very much needs, qualities which are divinely natural to the child and which should be preserved throughout our experience. "beloved children," she writes, "the world has need of you,—and more as children than as men and women: it needs your innocence, unselfishness, faithful affection, uncontaminated lives." Then she tells how these virtues may be preserved. She says, "You need also to watch, and pray that you preserve these virtues unstained, and lose them not through contact with the world." And finally she closes her ringing message with a challenging thought about ambition. "What grander ambition is there," she appeals, "than to maintain in yourselves what Jesus loved, and to know that your example, more than words, makes morals for mankind!" May we not conclude that the well-taught child in Sunday School is making morals for mankind?

It would be well if every boy and girl in our Sunday Schools were to memorize this brief but rousing message from our great Leader. Think what it means to the child to be assured that the world needs him. This assurance can change the child's entire outlook on life. Especially in the case of the diffident child, the child struggling with a sense of inferiority or a sense of limitation or lack of opportunities. This assurance becomes a very definite call to the child, a call that fills him with conviction, courage, resolve, and expectation and tells him that he has a real purpose for being.

Let us consider what it means to the child to know that he actually has something right now that the world needs. This is not something that he must acquire through toil and struggle, but something to be preserved through watching and praying. Its value is above rubies. Innocence, unselfishness, faithful affection, and purity are divinely natural to the child. Our Sunday School teaches him to claim these qualities. And when he is assured that the world has need of them, he will value them. Then he can appreciate our Leader's admonition to watch and pray that they be not lost through contact with the world.

Our young people have not only important roles to fulfill but important decisions to make today, decisions which determine their own progress and their usefulness to the world. Both watching and praying are essential. The child who learns to watch diligently and to pray earnestly about every undertaking not only will be spared many mistakes, many hardships and heartaches, and the retracing of misdirected footsteps, but will be aiding the establishment of Christ's kingdom on earth.

It may be said that our responsibility for the boys and girls of today and our responsibility for the world of tomorrow are inseparable. Let us consider this for a moment. What will the world of tomorrow be like? What will be the determining factor in the development of tomorrow's world? Undoubtedly the world of tomorrow will be measured by the thinking of those who are children today. Of children, Mrs. Eddy is quoted as saying that theirs is the white unwritten page. (See "We Knew Mary Baker Eddy," First Series, p. 37.) What they will write on that clear, white page as the years advance will depend upon the spiritual education that we provide for them, and on that inscription rests the progress of mankind.

How slow or fast the world will emerge from the darkness of materialism into the light of spirituality will depend upon the quality of the thinking of men and women. It will depend upon how much of true childlikeness is either preserved or reclaimed in individual thought. Speaking to an adult group, Jesus said, "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:3). Thus we see clearly that only the childlike qualities will establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.

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