Article May 28, 1910 Issue

MOTHER-LOVE

ANNIE DINSMORE MC CLURE.

In puzzling out the problems of human relationships and trying to disentangle "the interlaced ambiguities of being" (Science and Health, p. 114), it has taken the writer years of sincere study to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory sense of human mother-love and its relation to spiritual reality. Very early in my study of Christian Science circumstance compelled the particular consideration of this department of human life, and it was discerned that much—or, as it then seemed, all—of this boasted sentiment was, in fact, self-love. The creation of another mortal in one's own likeness being the self-division of mortal thought, the love or preference for this offshoot of self was merely self-love, and was shared by all the lower animals up to an age in the offspring where individuality is manifested to a degree offensive to this self-love. This was as far as the solution progressed for some time, and it was obviously inadequate.

Next came the step involved in the work of mentally undoing the seeming links of material creation and relationship, and of rendering to Spirit, God, what is His alone, namely, creative power. I saw that my child was safe only so long as she was held in right and true relation to the one Father-Mother. Lately, through conscientioius effort to separate error from my thought of man, I am grateful to have taken another step. Again I was forced to the problem. (How sweetly Love gives us our lessons, until they are sufficient to advance us.) It was a case which demanded unselfish, impartial love, and it was at last given me to see wherein human mother-love reflects the divine, and wherein it fails in this reflection. This passage from Science and Health (p. 286) gave me the leading: "The divine Principle, Love, creates and governs all that is real." The human mother-sense clings to the good, and refuses to recognize evil as in reality belonging to the true selfhood of her offspring,—denies it mentally and audibly. We often hear of human mothers the criticism that they are unable to see any fault in their children. God cannot see faults in His children. Did not Paul say, "Love ... taketh not account of evil" (Stand. Ver.)?

To deny error and hold as real only the good, is what brings to light the manifestation of the sons of God. It is in this that human motherhood most nearly resembles the divine; and for this reason many a vice-worn man carries in his heart's core the sweetest and most perfect ideal ever held in his darkened sense of life, and finds the sole impulse to better living in the thought of his mother's love. Add to this pure gleam of divinity the universality and impartiality which characterize the divine parenthood, and we shall shed upon each of His little ones who is wandering in a sense of motherlessness, the same vivifying regenerating ray, and bring each orphaned thought back to his mother's breast,—to the Father-Mother God. Then we shall be in the way of bringing to pass God's kingdom on earth, "as it is in heaven."

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