It came to a head in the supermarket. They had been angry with each other for days. He felt she was not supporting him sufficiently in his new job; she resented his long hours and what she saw as his lack of concern with her task of looking after him and the baby in strange surroundings. They were far from relatives or friends to whom to turn.

Their family, like countless others in the Western world today, was being challenged by anger, resentment, fear, self-centeredness —all in an overall context of a more permissive social fabric.

Morose, he pushed a supermarket cart, on which was balanced a baby bed, with the baby inside. Suddenly the bed slipped to the floor. Though the baby was unharmed, its cry split the air. She rushed over, blaming him. He was overcome with self-pity and self-hate. The drive home was misery.

And then, like a burst of light in a dark room, healing came—in the garage of their apartment house. When the car stopped, she said, through her tears, "We cannot get out of this car until we know that none of this anger and despair can pull us apart. It can't —not if we know who we really are, and what's holding us together."

Right then and there he felt himself respond. Husband and wife shared a flood of fresh ideas. They saw themselves and the baby as under the parenthood of the source of all that is real and lasting, the God they knew as good. As Christian Scientists, they had learned to love God as the Father-Mother of the infinite, eternal, spiritual universe. Both husband and wife consciously identified themselves as divine ideas, individual expressions of God's goodness. They knew that these ideas cannot move out of the orbit of the one omnipresent parent Mind, whose love fills all space.

And so they were drawn closer together humanly; the anger and fear were dissipated by divine law working in the consciousness of each.

In many nations today the institution of the family is in the line of fire. In the United States the divorce rate is rising. In 1970 alone the rate was 14 per 1,000 marriages—or a total of 700,000 divorces for the year, an increase of 40 percent over the figure for most of the 1960's. ^{The Family System in America by Ira Reiss (New York, 1971), pp. 280, 283;}

Families face new social conditions. What is known as the "extended related" family—grandparents and other relatives with whom children can form a bond and from whom they can learn, living under the same roof as parents and children—has given way to the smaller "nuclear" family in the Western world. An increasingly permissive society's newspapers, radio, television, and movies portray infidelity and other lack of morals in a sophisticated, attractive light. Men busy in an advanced technological era tend to move their households far more often than in the past: in the United States five times in five years is not uncommon. A large income, as well as one that is too small, can cause family problems—each in its own way.

Marriage counselors in the United States report that loose morals both before and after marriage, and too little respect for permanence and responsibility during marriage, lead many to an easy come, easy go attitude toward wedlock.

Sociologists are divided on whether these trends are greater or less than thirty years ago. High divorce rates for the United States in 1971 are matched by other figures showing that 70 percent of those divorced remarry within a few years, and that most of them stay married the second time. ^{Dr. Reiss, in an interview with the writer;} Nonetheless, it remains true that, when entered into as an escape or physical or romantic self-fulfillment, marriage is degraded into narrow selfishness. Children look elsewhere for the love and security they cannot find at home: many resort to the temptations of apathy, drugs, alcohol, and crime. Sound families make sound societies; and the reverse of the statement is equally valid.

Searches are being carried on for alternatives to the nuclear family pattern. One idea, in Europe as well as in America, is a variation of the extended related family—the extended nonrelated approach, better known as the "commune." Under strict discipline, some communes appear to be working; others split up quickly.

While all this ferment goes on, a search to strengthen and uplift the family continues. Successful families provide humans with a fundamental setting for love, supply, security. Family is where the child learns, imitates, develops, and where he tests ideas and moral values.

Christian Scientists rely on a view of family that is radically spiritual. Their approach is based on the conviction that God, who is Mind, or Spirit, is All-in-all. According to the first chapter of Genesis, man is created in the image and likeness of God. God is the Parent of all that is real, including man. Mind is the originator and sustainer of man, whose reality is spiritual, harmonious, and eternal. Therefore mental arguments that despair and fear are inevitable and unconquerable can be proved unreal, wrong, and powerless.

The Christian Science starting point is perfect God expressing Himself in perfect man, not limited and imperfect Deity governing limited and imperfect man. Divine ideas reach human consciousness through the Christ, Truth, embodied to the highest degree on earth in the life of Jesus, whose example Christian Scientists take as their ideal.

The daily effort to understand these truths frees both husbands and wives from jealousy or indifference. They prove that each expression of God, deriving its identity from God, not from a set of human circumstances, must dwell harmoniously and in selfless love with all other expressions under the divine parenthood of Love.

The marriage vow is very solemn. To live up to it fully, though not always easy, is one of the highest forms of human behavior. It allows the one who does it to express something of the divine here on earth, to learn more of true Life, God, and to contribute to the elevation of mankind.

Through Christian Science, husbands can have evidence that the welfare of their family depends not upon unaided human effort but on the never-failing supply of good ideas from infinite Mind, God. Knowing that supply is assured, wives can give full rein to their own potentialities. They need not feel chained down, cut off from their training and experience by family life. They can realize that the purpose of divine Love is to love, and that Love does not deprive any of its ideas of a single good quality, or of the opportunity to express it.

From this truth, they and their husbands also can see that any permissiveness toward their children stems from the false belief that materiality can be alluring. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "The destruction of the claims of mortal mind through Science, by which man can escape from sin and mortality, blesses the whole human family." ^{Science and Health, p. 103;}

My wife and I think of ourselves not as human originators of three children but as their guardians, since the children, in their true spiritual identities, are already complete and cared for. We endeavor to understand that their growth and development are under the mighty, tender care of the one Father-Mother God.

Children too can learn to think of themselves as dependent upon the infinite resources of the one infinite Spirit, and not as pawns of human parents, subject to parents' whims and ignorance. My wife and I have also found it extremely useful to realize that our inheritance is from God, not from our respective sets of human parents. This has had wonderful effects in freeing us from outlooks and illnesses that affected our parents and reappeared briefly in ourselves and in our children. The belief of heredity, whether pointing to good or bad qualities, we have learned to be false.

What holds the family together? Love of God, good, actively expressed. Though he loved his human family, Christ Jesus made it quite clear that he regarded as his true family those who "hear the word of God, and do it." ^{Luke 8:21.}

Normal, happy family life is the exemplification, humanly, of the divine Life—of the Father-Mother God and His ideas, bound together in the divine pattern of never-ending love.