One of the most dangerous beliefs is a false sense of motherhood, which is induced by personal sense. It operates in the world and in families, through making people think, first of all, that they own a child, and that that child has got to do certain things. Quite frankly, in the practice of Christian Science you see so often that the effect on children of a false human sense of motherhood is very detrimental.

If you have a true sense of motherhood, you will let a child develop naturally according to its own spiritual identity. You will uphold for it a standard in your own life and in every detail. If you have a true sense of motherhood, you will uplift the divine motherhood for it, and that will always guide both you and the child as to what to say and do in the human, because divine motherhood is universal, impartial Love.

Parents would have a lovely influence and a right influence over their children if, instead of trying to influence them through their own human will and desire, or their own standard of many years ago, they would lift up the standard of divine motherhood in their own thought and let that and that alone govern their words and actions. If they have the standard of faith in divine Love and its ability to take care of every one of its ideas, and if they will give the child a chance to develop according to the divine plan in its own individual way, then we shan’t lose that sweet relationship that we should have, the natural, spontaneous, lovely relationship which should exist between children and their parents.

This growing up in a family of a lovely relationship which is based on a recognition of the divine motherhood is all-important, and we should be able to build up lovely homes. But there’ll be no lovely homes without Love in them.

A true sense of motherhood recognizes that there is a divine plan for every idea, and that every idea has divine individuality. It recognizes that Love is forever fulfilling that divine plan, and so every individuality in that plan must be fulfilled.

Now, we must work these questions out through Science, through divine Love; we certainly can’t work them out otherwise. The highest aspect of Science is divine motherhood. So it must be worked out the scientific way.

If we are parents, to impress our children with a right idealism is important, but it is essential for every one of us that we should have a true sense of motherhood. Every man, woman, and child needs to culture a true sense of motherhood, and that true sense of motherhood in the acceptance of what is divinely good, the bringing forth of it, the conception of it. The highest sense of God is Love, or motherhood, and it means “conception unconfined” (Science and Health 323:11-12), not the conception which binds, but the conception which realizes that Divine Love is universal and impartial.

Let Divine Love govern with its impartial and universal plan, then we shall lose a burdened sense of things, and we shall rejoice in the irresistible operation of Love’s divine design.