Right the day must win

When reading a book which has Notes on chapters in the back, it is an excellent idea to actually read those notes!

 In particular this week I have found a piece beginning on page 335 (it continues to page 338) about Mrs. Eddy’s inspiration in starting a Christian Science Sunday School. It tells of her coaching five year old Warren Choate to represent the idea of Sunday school by reciting a poem at a Sunday Service. (This seems to have occurred about 1883 when Mrs. Eddy was preaching at the services at Hawthorne Hall in Boston). The full quote from Mrs. Choate is not repeated in any other book I have read, and it is delightful—too good to miss by not reading the end notes! The little poem was:

 

And right is right – since God is God;

And right the day must win;

To doubt would be disloyalty,

To falter would be sin!

 Of course, we find the full poem, which was written by Frederick William Faber, English hymn writer and theologian of the Catholic faith, as hymn 86/87 in the Christian Science Hymnal: –

 

                   God’s glory is a wondrous thing,

                   Most strange in all its ways,
                   And of all things on earth, least like
                   What men agree to praise.

                   O blest is he to whom is given

                   The instinct that can tell
                   That God is on the field, although
                   He seems invisible.

                   And blest is he who can divine

                   Where right doth really lie,
                   And dares to side with what seems wrong
                   To mortals’ blindfold eye.

                   For right is right, since God is God;

                   And right the day must win;
                   To doubt would be disloyalty,
                   To falter would be sin.

The workers around Mrs. Eddy seem to have been somewhat perplexed as to where the children were to come from to be pupils in a Christian Science Sunday school. They (the workers) were, as Powell puts it, “above the age desirable for such a movement” (p. 338). Warren Choate and Mrs. Rice’s son were the only children in the movement and the Rice child was living in Lynn, not Boston.

The other matter which took my eye this week was the fact that about this same time Mrs. Eddy preached for six months in a Baptist church in Boston. The Note reads (Note 20, page 341): Mrs. Eddy wrote an early student: “a Baptist clergyman in Boston (now more of an Adventist) sent for me to supply his pulpit and I did, that gave me the opportunity for six months to keep the ‘good tidings’ circulating. I healed a large number by my sermons and they owned it at the close of them.”

Powell notes that she did this without compromising her message (p. 159).

Joyce Voysey