Article March 30, 1940 Issue

"The great commandment in the law"

E. OLIVE DAVIS

THE Master's answer to the question, "Which is the great commandment in the law?" is a superb summary of true worship. Jesus said: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-self." Really to love God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourself is a concept which, from the nature of its infinite source, must be ever unfolding in the thought of the Christian Scientist.

It is interesting to note that the Master says the second commandment is like the first. In other words, he has set forth two facts of the same basic truth. Earnest Christians endeavoring to follow in his footsteps have sometimes felt that it was easier to obey the First Commandment than the second, easier to love God than to love their neighbor, for the neighbor has often seemed to them quite unlovely and definitely unlovable. Such misapprehension could come only from a failure to understand what it means to love God supremely. In this age the teachings of our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, have so clarified the meaning of this great commandment that all can understand it, however attenuated at present may be their demonstration of it.

In Christian Science the old religious belief of a distant God, the heavenly Father of a universe consisting of the just and the unjust, has vanished before the satisfying truth of the oneness of being, God and His idea, man, coexistent, inseparable, indivisible. To the student of Christian Science, the joyous task of loving God "with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," as Christ Jesus commanded, means the daily endeavor to let divine Love govern his thoughts, feelings, motives, even as did the Way-shower, who so truly reflected God that he could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Learning through study and demonstration to know God as "Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 465), and to let this divine concept replace the beliefs of mortality, is, as our Leader points out (ibid., p. 3), "the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire."

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