Until an understanding of what constitutes true maturity is obtained, we are all subject in some degree to the belief that development can be uncontrolled, unlovely, and uncertain.

Mrs. Eddy says on page 206 of "Miscellaneous Writings": "The advancing stages of Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion; idleness is the foe of progress. And scientific growth manifests no weakness, no emasculation, no illusive vision, no dreamy absentness, no insubordination to the laws that be, no loss nor lack of what constitutes true manhood."

The following experience helped me to understand the truth of that statement. Sometime ago I had planned a day at home. Knowing this, my older children, who were on holiday, had asked some school friends to spend the afternoon with us. However, just before lunch, I received a telephone call making it necessary for me to go to town immediately on a business matter. I was not at all interested in leaving a number of teen-agers alone for the three hours it would take me to make the trip from our semirural home.

But since the business matter was urgent, I at last decided to go, taking our youngest child with me. I was in no way reassured by meeting the visitors at the gate, already on their way an hour before the expected time. Arriving at the station and finding that we should have to wait some time for a train, I sat down to reason things out as we are taught in Christian Science.

On a previous occasion the young visitors had become rather exuberant: several valuable trees had been damaged, and a family pet teased to near frenzy before my intervention. Today my controlling influence would be absent, and I reached out in prayer for guidance.

I remembered the familiar Bible story of Mary and Joseph, who felt great anxiety for the twelve-year-old Jesus because he could not be found at the end of a day's journey from Jerusalem. I recalled that for three days they sought him back along the road and in the city of Jerusalem until, at last, they found him in the temple. When Mary rebuked him saying, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing" (Luke 2:48), Jesus replied, "How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

I saw how many hours of weary searching we can save ourselves if in seeking closeness and oneness with our young people, we go straight to the temple, or "the shrine of Love." which is one of the definitions Mrs. Eddy gives of "temple" (Science and Health, p. 595). To worry, to doubt for a moment that man can do anything but be about his Father's business, is to express the very uncertainty we condemn as adolescent.

Perhaps, above all else, the young respect confidence. Not the brash self-confidence of the egotist but the spiritual quality Jesus expressed when he said in humble self-knowledge, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28:18). That power lay in his ability to see and to recognize only good, and we can all emulate to some degree his wonderful example.

Are we ever guilty of saying, "I hope my child will love Christian Science when he becomes adult but, of course, the choice lies with him"? This outlook usually stems from the parents' belief that in their child there is some actual resistance to Truth. Then is it not vital to meet this adversary quickly and settle with him (see Matt. 5:25) rather than allow a doubt to lie dormant through the years?

To consider resistance a fact and then ask, "Why?" is to sentence oneself to vain searching down the road of human conjecture from which run the blind alleys of heredity, environment, false education, and so on. Let us return to the temple where the man of God's creating is found to be conditioned by "spiritual sense," which, Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 209), "is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God."

Perhaps we imagine that while our young people are under our roof, they will behave with circumspection, but that as they leave home and go into the world they will be subject to temptations or that they will become careless or lazy. Then we need to return at once to the temple, and in this "shrine of Love" find a truer sense of home or harmony from which the real man is never absent, nor indeed can be, for it is his eternal dwelling place.

On the occasion previously referred to, this reasoning firmly rebuked my belief in immature, adolescent thought, and I felt a great sense of peace and joy. I noticed for the first time the beautiful day and the happy faces of the children around us. On our return home all was in order. The visitors, after a pleasant game of cricket, had departed; and our own children, having completed, unasked, some tasks I had left undone, were quietly reading.

Subsequent visits of teen-agers to our home have proved to us that when we early seek and find their true being in the temple, it can be said of these young people, as it was of the boy Jesus, that they increase "in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man" (Luke 2:52).