Article October 4, 1969 Issue

Unselfed Love Reflects Divine Power

GRACE ARCHER DUNBAR

Sometimes in Christian Science treatment, or prayer, before we feel the love that heals instantaneously, we have to spend hours in affirming the truth of God's goodness and in vigorously denying the presence or power of evil. This is because we have allowed our thoughts to become bogged down in a false sense of self. Christian Science teaches that every discordant condition is the result of a false belief based on the premise that man has a material selfhood and is the victim of material conditions. How do we prevent mesmeric beliefs from dominating our thinking and experience? By constantly acknowledging and expressing the perfect nature of God, divine Love, in our human affairs.

To demonstrate perfect love, we must renounce in thought and action all selfish tendencies, because these hinder our spiritual perception. A landscape may be colorful and alive with beauty, but viewed through a dirty window, it becomes distorted and drab. Selfishness has a similar effect on spiritual perception. Selfishness plays a large role in keeping our thought occupied by a material selfhood with certain likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains, deficiencies and excesses, joys and sorrows. It therefore obscures our view of the complete, perfect man made in the image and likeness of God.

In Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy we read: "Self-love is more opaque than a solid body. In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, selfjustification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death." ^{Science and Health, p. 242;}