From the Editors May 21, 2012 Issue

'Being good' or being good?

The Editors

As Christian Scientists, we readily agree that the universal laws of truth, revealed by Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery, are timeless. But do we also see the ways she guides us to and through these universal laws as equally timeless?

Take for instance a sentence plucked from her remarkable essay “Love” in Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “Love is not something put upon a shelf, to be taken down on rare occasions with sugar-tongs and laid on a rose-leaf” (p. 250).

Those words may have been written with the hand of a 19th-century pen, but we can’t leave it at that. No one knew better than Mrs. Eddy that the so-called accoutrements—the “things”—of the day, were fleeting at best. And that sugar tongs and rose leaves themselves might surely go the way of the horse-drawn carriage.

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