Sunday July 4th, 2021 Roundtable

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Morning Prayers

The government of divine Love is supreme.

— from — from Miscellany by Mary Baker Eddy, page 278


The First Commandment in the Hebrew Decalogue — “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” — obeyed, is sufficient to still all strife. God is the divine Mind. Hence the sequence: Had all peoples one Mind, peace would reign.

— from Miscellany by Mary Baker Eddy, page 279


Man is free, and freedom is the God-given birthright.

— from Divinity Course and General Collectanea, (the “Blue Book”), by Mary Baker Eddy, page 90

Discussion points

423 — WATCH lest you shrink from using the term Principle for God, because it seems cold. An artist must study the human skeleton, before he can fill it out and make it beautiful. Principle describes the anatomy of God, in the sense that it unfolds Him as law, foundation, reality, basis, source and essence. When understood, this term can then be enriched with the warm and appealing qualities of Love, Life, Soul, Mind, etc.

It can be deduced from Mrs. Eddy’s definition of God, that the masculine thought approaches God through the ascending steps of Mind, Spirit, Soul, and the feminine thought approaches Him through the ascending steps of Love, Truth and Life. If the body of a bird should represent Principle, then one wing would be Mind, Spirit, Soul and the other wing would be Life, Truth, Love. Thus all the beautiful qualities of God must be seen to be supported by unerring Principle.

— from 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter



GOLDEN TEXT: Psalm 19 : 1

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”



Christian Science in common with primitive Christianity teaches that God is able and willing to set mankind free from all evil and to bring them to the glorious liberty of conscious sonship, or unity with himself. God, being wholly perfect and free, is the perfect Emancipator. Our real selfhood, the spiritual man, is also free; and as we identify ourselves with our spiritual selfhood, rather than with any material sense of selfhood, in our human experience we become free. To identify ourselves with God, His synonyms, attributes, and manifestations, is to be set free from His suppositional opposites. To identify ourselves with Love, to manifest Love, to be loving, is to be free from all that is unlike Love and opposed to Love. To identify ourselves with Truth, to know Truth, and to be true and truthful, is to be free from error. To identify ourselves with Life, to be full of the consciousness and activities of Life, is to be free from death. In like manner, to identify ourselves with divine Principle, Soul, Spirit, and Mind, is to be free from the sense of all that is unprincipled, sensual, material, and mindless. It is also true that to identify ourselves with Christ, God with us or God manifested to us in goodness, is to be free from all the claims of evil. In Christian Science it is seen that all the virtues are emancipating and all the vices enslaving; that all the virtues heal and all the vices make sick; that all the virtues are life-giving and all the vices are deadly. All goodness is freedom, and makes free; as all evil is slavery, and enslaves.

— from “Freedom” Christian Science Journal, January 1907 by Prof. Joel Rufus Mosley.



Never be embarrassed to admit a mistake.

— Plainfield Roundtable



No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, you can still turn around.

— Anonymous



Be the change you wish to see.

We have no moral right and no authority in Christian Science for influencing the thoughts of others, except it be to serve God and benefit mankind. Man is properly self-governed, and he should be guided by no other mind than Truth, the divine Mind. Christian Science gives neither moral right nor might to harm either man or beast. The Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and with the reality of things. The mental malpractitioner is not, cannot be, a Christian Scientist; he is disloyal to God and man; he has every opportunity to mislead the human mind, and he uses it. People may listen complacently to the suggestion of the inaudible falsehood, not knowing what is hurting them or that they are hurt. This mental bane could not bewilder, darken, or misguide consciousness, physically, morally, or spiritually, if the individual knew what was at work and his power over it.

This unseen evil is the sin of sins; it is never forgiven. Even the agony and death that it must sooner or later cause the perpetrator, cannot blot out its effects on himself till he suffers up to its extinction and stops practising it. The crimes committed under this new-old régime of necromancy or diabolism are not easily reckoned. At present its mystery protects it, but its hidden modus and flagrance will finally be known, and the laws of our land will handle its thefts, adulteries, and murders, and will pass sentence on the darkest and deepest of human crimes.

— from Message for 1901 by Mary Baker Eddy, page 20



Gratitude: We are not grateful to God. That would be two, and Being is one. God is not giving anything to me, but He is expressing Himself as me. Therefore I enjoy fully the love, goodness and perfection which constitute Being. I am not grateful to God. True gratitude is appreciation of everything from the standpoint of the Truth. God is the highest sense of light, love and beauty in an eternal and indestructible way, without any sense of time and person.

— from Notes from a Class as Taught, by Laura Sargent



Forum post — All is Allness & Its Unlimited Expression by Parthens



Forum post — Equalizes the sexes and annnuls the cure on man. by Joanne from FL



Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

— Proverbs 3: 5 from the King James Bible



So, when you seek to hear God’s voice and do not seem to hear it, do not be disappointed. Every day make the effort to open your thought and let God talk to you, and if you are not conscious of His doing so, — if you do not hear it with your material ears or are even not conscious of it with your conscious thought, — take it on faith. Believe that it is being recorded on the tablet of your mind, that you are laying up treasure in heaven, — in your spiritual consciousness, — and when the right time comes you will be able to give it out, and know what God has been saying to you by what you say to another.

— from Mary Baker Eddy, Her Spiritual Precepts by Gilbert Carpenter



People say I am changeable, — that I change my mind frequently. I do change my mind frequently, but when I do, it is always God that changes me. Sometimes I will be headed in one direction, like a weather vane, and will stay that way for several days. The next time you see me, I will have turned completely around and am going the other way, but in the meantime God has given me additional light and has led me to make the change. There have been times in working out a problem when I have not known just what step to take and finding it necessary to make a move of some sort, I have taken a step as nearly as I could in the right direction. Perhaps I would find out shortly that it was wrong, but this step gave me a new point of view that I would not have had, had I not taken it as I did. I would not condemn myself, therefore, for what seemed to be a mistake, but would include it as part of the working out of the problem.

— from Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy by Adam H. Dickey



We would hear no other voices,
We would heed no other call;

— Hymn 58 From, The Christian Science Hymnal, 1932 editionby Henry Francis Lyte



The first day’s teaching on the subject of Love she (Mary Baker Eddy) concluded somewhat as follows: Love is the Father, who is strong in His care for His children and provides for every need. Love feeds, clothes, and shelters every one of His dear ones. Love is a Mother tenderly brooding over all Her children. This Mother guards each one from harm, nourishes, holds close to Herself, and carefully leads along the upward way. Love is a Shepherd who goes forth into the darkness of the night, into the storm and wind, to find the lost sheep. This Shepherd of Love leaves the beaten path, searches the wood and marsh, pushes aside the brambles, and seeks until the lost is found; then He places it within His bosom and returns to heal and restore.

— from Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, by REV. Irving C. Tomlinson, page 90



Forum post — The Sound in the Mulberry Trees. by Susan from MA



God. The great I am; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.

— from the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, page 587



Article “The Branch that Grew Over the Wall,” Clear Correct Teaching by Herbert Eustace, pages 600 and 601



Mrs. Eddy also made a statement to the effect that “ingratitude is the original sum total of evil and its only remedy is gratitude – the highest human quality – its destruction.” It is said that a grateful heart goes all the way, and that is what brought you here today.

— from Clear Correct Teaching, by Herbert Eustace, page 912



Final Readings

When we once become truly cognizant of the name or nature of God, and recognize the real universe as necessarily like God, its creator, in every essential quality and attribute, we see the necessity of challenging each and every evidence that has prompted belief in another creator, in self-creation or in accidental creation. We also see the imperative demand that we discredit all testimony which implies that any part of God’s creation is out of harmony with any other part—that in God’s realm there can be any such thing as discord, disease, death, or decay. In a realm whose Principle is Love, how can there be any such thing as hate, fear, jealousy, envy? In a realm whose creator is Life, how can there be a place for disease and death? In a realm whose cause is Truth, how can there be an effect called falsity? Says Mrs. Eddy, “Truth has no consciousness of error. Love has no sense of hatred. Life has no partnership with death. Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God” (Science and Health, p. 243).

Life, Truth, and Love and other names—full synonyms—for God. Their supposititious opposites can no more exist in their ever-presence than can ice in boiling water, darkness in light, or sound in silence; and when this fact becomes apparent, its proof becomes so simple that even a child can obtain unerring results. How? By unwavering obedience to the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and its converse, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, … thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them;” in other words, never forget for an instant that God is the only Cause and creator; that His creation must be, and is, like Himself. To be convinced of this is merely the foretaste of proof of the fact, with its resultant satisfaction; and on the other hand, even momentary assent to the belief that there can be any power except God is not only to open the door to failure but to deprive one’s self of the fruit of right thinking so long as the bonds of the belief are unbroken. Mere verbal assent to the command is of no account,—”the letter killeth.

— from “God’s Name” Christian Science Journal, August 22, 1908 by M. G. Kains, M.S.