THE PURIFICATION OF SENSE

John B. Willis

Refinement of experience is always preceded by purification of thought, the ennoblement of our living by the exaltation of our concepts, and it is this that gives such dynamic significance to the ideal. The believer's highest concept of Christian truth and of Christian privilege is the spiritual magnet, in loyal and continuous response to which he realizes his spiritual advance, together with the advance of his ideal, and this process is never more certainly indicated than when he finds himself entertaining a higher and holier sense of things, when words bring to consciousness an ever sweeter, more uplifting meditation.

All this will appear when we think of the simple and familiar word love, to which different people give such diversified and contradictory interpretations. For those whose activities are impelled, for the most part, by animal instincts, love means fleshly satisfaction, and like Queen Guinevere, they may have to learn through unspeakable suffering the unworthiness of this too common sense, and in their shame and agony cry out with her,—

Ah, my God,
What might I not have made of Thy fair world
Had I but loved Thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known.

To others, love brings the thought of absorption in and devotion to human personality, the paternal, fraternal, marital, and patriotic attachments which lead to so much heroic sacrifice, and which bring their meed of transient joy, and, sadly oft, of pain.

For yet others, love signifies that oneness and intercommunion of spirit which in its unselfishness, its purity, and its impelling inspiration, is intuitively recognized as the highest realization and expression of the heart of God. They have come to understand our Leader when she says of Christ Jesus, "Out of the amplitude of his pure affection, he defined love" (Science and Health, p. 54), and with the poet, they can unhesitatingly say, "Love is the highest we feel, therefore we must believe that God is Love." Upon this spiritually scientific plane of apprehension we who are parents may find a new and more intelligently sympathetic interest in our children. We perceive that from God's point of view they are our brothers and sisters, and that we truly love them only as we regard them, and reckon with them, in the light of this diviner sense. Their faults are now uncovered, not as identified with them, but as manifestations of that which is wholly incongruous with their true selves, and as we lovingly lead them to see this they will join us in resisting the asserted reality and rule of appetites and tempers which are the common enemies of all mankind. We are beginning to love our children in a helpful way. Our sense of affection and our sense of relation are both being advanced.

Upon this plane, too, husbands and wives are led to think of the ideal marriage, that true comradeship in which spiritual aspirations are given the rule and authority, and the home becomes like unto "a watered garden." Upon this plane all genuine and lasting ties are formed, and ideal affection is proven to be the mutually appreciative attraction and intercommunion of divine ideas. Such love is not conditioned by age, sex, or human surroundings, but only by likeness of apprehension and spiritual impulse. It may exist, therefore, between men no less certainly than between man and woman. Thus were David and Jonathan united, thus Tennyson and Hallam. After seventeen years of unforgetting, the sorrowing poet erected, in his matchless elegy, "In Memoriam," a monument in honor of Love's pure reflection which will delight the vision of all great hearts until time's end.

Christian Science points the way to the redemption of human living by revealing the beauty and the gain of an ever-advancing ideal, that higher and higher reach of concept and of aspiration which declares for the unmeasured greatness of the spiritual possibilities of man.

John B. Willis.

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