As a young wife I felt a deep need for a happier sense of my marriage. My husband's mother had been healed in Christian Science of what doctors had diagnosed as an incurable heart condition, and before our marriage he had tossed on a table the copy of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy his mother had given him, saying, "There must be something good in this."

Too self-centered at the time, I didn't read the book. But after our son was born, I began to feel the need for an understanding of God. Up to that period I had thought of God vaguely in the orthodox way of my early upbringing. I found the term "infinite good" for God in Science and Health was a help in lifting my thinking out of this mistaken view. And Mrs. Eddy's definition of God, with the seven synonyms, especially Love, began to take root (p. 465): "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love."

Although my husband did not accept this teaching for himself during the first thirty years of our marriage, I have always been deeply grateful for his willingness to have our son raised in Christian Science.

Many times situations loomed as insurmountable. Once during a particularly unhappy period when we seemed at opposite poles of thinking and living, I heard myself saying to him, "You'll never be satisfied until you find out how lovely you really are!"

Mercifully I was awakened to the insidiousness of self-righteousness, but only when I had grown spiritually strong enough to bear the shock of its ugly unmasking. One of the surgeon-knife statements in Miscellaneous Writings by Mrs. Eddy was operative in this mental surgery (p. 288): "The selfish role of a martyr is the shift of a dishonest mind, nothing short of self-seeking; and real suffering would stop the farce." I began to look away from person for my view of my husband, praying, "Dear God, You tell me about him; help me to see him the way You know him!"

I was awakened to stop the unconscious malpractice of mentally pushing at his thinking: "If only he..." or even, directly: "If only you..." I realized that to address another silently is a form of mental malpractice, and that I was being used to invade his mental realm, his right to privacy, in order to influence him humanly. And I understood why he would suddenly turn on me without apparent provocation, resulting in my injured surprised feeling because I hadn't "done a thing to deserve this!" Later I found this statement by Mrs. Eddy in The People's Idea of God (p. 10): "Thought is the essence of an act, and the stronger element of action."

I saw that as the Christian Scientist of this team it was first up to me to make room in my own thinking for a happy home. One day I took a sheet of paper and wrote down all the things that did not belong in my home, naming whatever would disrupt, tear apart, destroy harmony, happiness, and progress so long as I allowed myself to accept it either as its agent or as its victim. As each ugly, self-centered, self-justifying, condemning thought surfaced, I faced it squarely and denied it a place either in my thoughts of myself or my thoughts of my husband.

I saw that I was digging a foundation for the right idea of home to be built in my consciousness before it could be manifested outwardly. There could be no spongy sogginess of self-pity, no rottenness of resentment or hate, no justification of a false sense of self at its base if home was to be enduring, happy, God-blessed. I saw that home-building—as well as church-building, community-building, world-building—is at its root individual, though its effects appear as collective; that no one is forced to wait until another "wakes up." I saw that ever since Adam the plaint had been: Lord, the partner You gave me to be with me in my home, the people You gave me to be with me in my church, my community, my world— they are the reason why I can't be better, and do better!

Next, I wrote down all the things that belonged in my home. They poured forth, right out from their inexhaustible source in God, filling two pages. A beautiful spiritually mental structure began to form in my thinking, as Soul's qualities and attributes, outlined by Mind. This structure began to live itself in my consciousness and govern my thinking.

It wasn't long after this that a great change took place in our experience. The events that unfolded culminated in my husband's turning to God in Christian Science for his way of living, and we spent many happy years working together in a branch church hundreds of miles away from our former location. This was a healed marriage after what had for so many years appeared as a very wide communication gap.

Once when we were shopping for groceries together a clerk asked if we had just recently been married! This was a happy illustration of the completeness of the demonstration. For more than sixteen years following this transformation our home radiated the peace and harmony and beauty that belong to all of God's children, on earth as in heaven.

Our son's quiet support and love for his parents through those trying years added immeasurably to the solution of the problem. Loyal friends, fellow church workers, stood by with steadying love for us both, and my gratitude for all is warm and deep.

Looking to God lifted me above grief when my husband gently passed on to further work and unfoldment. I refused to accept a status of incompleteness for myself or for him, knowing that man as God creates him—the true selfhood of each of us—never loses his manhood or his womanhood, which finds expression in spiritual understanding and peace, which are permanent.

Thank God for this way of life, given first by the Master, Christ Jesus, and for the scientific statement in Science and Health of the Principle and rules that Mrs. Eddy discovered and called Christian Science.

(Mrs.) Sarah V. Cornelius
Berkeley, California