with human beings who do suffer. Nearly every one is astonished when he first learns that Christian Scientists teach that we should not sympathize with those that are in pain. No, the mother must not even kiss the bruised head of her boy nor say, “My darling, mama knows it hurts.” Do not condemn too severely such a mother; she is working out Christian Science, she is consistent, she is metaphysical. “For to sympathize with the child is to recognize the existence of pain and this might lead to the inference that he has a material head in which pain is located, and this would spoil all our splendid theories, don't you see?” Christian Science compels its devotees so to reason, for its mission is to “make man God-like” and God cannot sympathize with those that suffer, for he cannot even recognize the existence of pain. So Mrs. Eddy says: “He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them. His sympathy is divine, not human.”[1]
A sympathy that arises without the recognition even of the pain of the sufferer is no sympathy at all. A sympathy that has in it no element of suffering is not sympathy. Why then speak of divine sympathy when there is not a point of similarity in it to human sympathy? This is another of Mrs. Eddy's verbal tricks, as the following quotation reveals: “Sympathy with sin, sorrow, and sickness would dethrone God as
