Article January 14, 1911 Issue

"HE THAT LOVETH NOT."

CLARENCE W. CHADWICK.

The chief concern of the student of Christian Science is how to express Love in thought and act. To accomplish this holy purpose he must first gain a right idea or concept of God. Early in his experience in Christian Science he is very liable to be forcefully impressed with the unmistakable meaning of the Scripture, "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love," and he finds enough in this text to occupy his thought day and night. Turn in whatever direction he may, he encounters this word love, standing out in bold relief against the clouds of sense, which would ever turn thought into opposite channels where human selfishness holds sway.

Before he sees that Love is "the King eternal" in the mental realm, he may query, Why do I have to love everybody before I can be healed by Christian Science? Or, thinking to justify his own uncorrected sense of justice and love, he may ask, Why can't I have my likes and dislikes, so long as I do not really hate any one? If he is honest and sincere, however, he soon learns that divine Love never ceases to be Love, but is unchanging in its manifestation toward friend or foe. Then there begins to dawn upon him a sense of his own mental poverty; he sees that his own limited sense of love has been as far removed from the Love that is God as the east is from the west. He begins to think of God as Love, but this is found to be insufficient to heal the deep-seated wounds of malice, hatred, anger, personal censure, and condemnation. He must receive and assimilate the love of God in his own heart, and express it in daily life, if he would lay the axe at the root of all troubles and be able to overcome the human hatred of Love and Truth.

Since Love is "of purer eyes than to behold evil," and cannot "look on iniquity," and since it "thinketh no evil," Love must be and is the divine Principle of all right thinking. It therefore follows that all wrong thinking, under whatever guise it may appear, is opposed to divine Love. To think wrong about anybody or anything is not then a manifestation of Love. Rather is it, in varying degree, a manifestation of human hate, or, to express it differently, whatever does not manifest Love is necessarily tainted with some opposite quality. Jesus made it very plain to his students that they were either for or against the truth; that they could not express both love and hate. Human likes and dislikes are born of the flesh: they are not the offspring of Spirit. Whatever is born of Truth and Love has no dual capacity to love and to hate. It can love only, and its love will destroy malice and hate and all kindred errors.

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