Article October 22, 1910 Issue

LIBERATION

CAPT. FAITHFULL CUMBERLEGE.

(THE student of Christian Science soon learns that both the letter and the spirit are essential to the successful practice of Christian healing.) The letter is truth reduced to human understanding; the spirit is the reflection of divine Love. Without Love to give it life, the letter would be only a useless imitation of truth, having none of truth's vitality or power. It would then be the letter that killeth, that would lead men away from rather than toward Truth.

But, fortunately for mankind, omnipresent Love is never absent, however much it may in belief appear otherwise, and some measure of Love's sunshine and peace invariably brightens the heart that submits, however slightly, to its inspiration and guidance. Yet even Love reflected would lack the "greater works," if it could be parted—as in belief it often seems to be—from its intelligence, the divine Mind, the absolute Truth; while the letter alone never yet healed anybody or anything. Hence the wanderer on this earth must seek to know the science of Truth as well as the love of Love, else he is almost helpless to combat the errors of mortal mind.

All human beings begin their conscious and systematized fight with the flesh from the standpoint of seeming lack of both of these qualities, truth and love. Probably the majority lack one rather than the other. If this is so, it is tolerably certain that most individuals lack love even more than truth, for intellect is the predominating boast of the human race. In Science and Health we read (p. 327): "Reason is the most active human faculty." Experience endorses this view emphatically, and leads on to the conclusion that mankind perceives more about truth and love than they can or would care as yet to practise; while, to judge by the repeated exhortations of Jesus and of the New Testament writers, the need of loving more, as a means to salvation and health, was as little understood then as now. (Love is wholly unselfish,) whereas the supposititious human mind is essentially self-centered, owing to its finite nature. The human mind believes wrongly that its existence depends upon its own fleshly body, and that it is thereby in constant peril. It believes falsely that there are other human minds, each having a separate fleshly existence, and that they can do one another mortal injury. This mind thinks, incorrectly, that it can be deprived by its brethren of all that it needs for its sustenance, that it can improve its own position at the expense of its fellows, and vice versa. Is it any wonder that the things it so greatly fears come upon it, and that mortal man lacks divine love when burdened with so great a weight of ignorance and distrust! (In order to find a refuge from his fears, mankind, individually and collectively, must climb above the mire of matter and find a footing in Spirit.) As matter fades from view, eyes are opened to discern man as "idea, the image, of Love" (Ibid., p. 475). Then a man is no longer afraid of those about him, and he loves more. Loving more, he identifies himself more with divine Principle, Love, and his life immediately expresses more of the harmony of Love. The reason for his former troubles is then clearly uncovered. Having lacked mostly love, it was love he needed most to prove the harmony of Life in God, and when that need was supplied he rose above the ills of mortality.

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LIBERATION

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