Daily Watch for the week of November 24th, — December 1st, 2024
215 — WATCH lest you accept and believe stories about our Leader to the effect that she frightened her students unduly over animal magnetism, and was at times herself made fearful over it.
It was exposed to our Leader that animal magnetism is the great deterrent to spiritual growth — the red dragon standing ready to devour the young child. Her first experience was to observe its operation through persons, when it seemed to make them act as the very embodiment of the evil one.
One who declared that Mrs. Eddy painted exaggerated pictures of evil in the early days, or that her exposures of it were fabrications, would thereby exclude some of the most important stones in the building of Christian Science.
Perhaps her efforts might be called the ‘fear of the Lord,’ since the effect of her disclosures of evil was to drive students to a more active and powerful demonstration of good. If a father wanted his child to hurry home at night, he might be justified in declaring that some danger lurked at the child’s heels. His motive would make what he did legitimate.
Think what it cost Mrs. Eddy to step down into the human mass of falsity and sin, in order to probe its hidden workings! She felt at home in the consciousness of good. Like a flower in the sun, she thrived on it. She felt far from at home, however, when the necessity was laid upon her to investigate the claims of sin, and to share this knowledge with her students. Yet she emerged from the experience unharmed, and with a knowledge of the operation of the lie that she knew would bless all mankind for all time.
We must never belittle her experience in the fiery furnace, nor believe that she was fanatical or fanciful, when she gave forth the lurid details of the operation of criminal magnetism. Let us rather thank God that through her stripes we are healed, through her desperate experiences we may learn how to keep awake to the claims of evil, and thus give them their death blow.
Mrs. Eddy encourages us to believe that, if we are awake and alert, we need not pass through the experiences of suffering for sin. She perceived the awfulness of sin; yet she taught the method whereby it can be dealt with, namely, by reducing it to nothingness.
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from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments, as given by Mary Baker Eddy, page 49
“Hear, O Israel, for the Lord, our God, is one God.”
You are not to come in your own name to pray.
You are not to control any mind.
You are to come only in the divine strength, and know that God will rule and does, and that hypnotism and evil minds cannot, and do not, control men or governments.
All power is God, good.
This is my only formula to Christian Scientists for prayer, and God will give you faith that will remove mountains.