Watching Point 257

257 — WATCH lest you believe that the right order is to take in Science first through the head, before the heart is ready. Jesus gave the parable of the two debtors, declaring that the most love came from the one to whom God forgave most. Mrs. Eddy opens the chapter in the textbook on Christian Science practice with the story of Mary Magdalene versus Simon, as if to warn us that those who take in Science through the head, — or intellectually, — like Simon, love little, and do not make the steadfast students that those do who take it in through the heart, through repentance, meekness and human affection.

Once Mrs. Eddy said, “I have learned from bitter experience that the head instructed before the heart is ready, costs me and our Cause dangerous difficulties and sore defeats.” She also tells us on page 60 of the textbook, “A mother’s affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever difficulties.” Perhaps this is a hint that, when Christian Science begins to make strong demands on students at which human sense rebels, only those remain loyal to it who love it, who have taken it in through the heart, — or the feminine nature. Those who have accepted it only through the head, — or the masculine nature, — as one might learn mathematics, fall away when the demand comes for self-sacrifice.

Healing the sick and reforming the sinner reach the heart, which all the talk and argument in the world cannot do. To Mrs. Eddy true healing was that which reached the heart of the one healed, and brought forth spiritual devoutness and contrition. Once she said, “The true Science — divine Science — will be lost sight of unless we arouse ourselves. This demonstrating to make matter build up is not Science. This building up of churches, the writing of articles and the speaking in public is the old way of building up a cause. The way I brought this cause into sight was through healing; and now these other things would come in and hide it just as was done in the time of Jesus.”