Editorial February 11, 1911 Issue

LOVE'S MINISTRY

John B. Willis

One's experience with men leads him speedily to divide them into two classes, those who are ever planning to get and those who are ever planning to give. The one class may be defined as radiant, the other as absorbent. One gains his chief joy in distribution, the other in accretion. One has an impelling sense of abundance, the other an anxious expectation of want. The life of one is endogenous, it wells up from within; the life of the other is exogenous, it is never increased save from without.

With an appeal to his every follower that is the more touching because of its indirectness, Christ Jesus said, "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister;" and the beautiful interpretation which his daily life gave to these words brings a rebuke not only to the grosser, more repulsive forms of indolent and unfeeling selfishness, but to those habits of personal requirement, of imposition, and of indifference to other, which so frequently come to dominate a large part of conduct, when perchance the individual is planning and working for some one thing or cause in an altogether unselfish way.

Some men are very large-minded and kindly in their home relations, but narrow and exacting in their business; some are very zealous for their church, but leave the care of city and state, the communal interests, wholly to others; some are uniformly courteous to their clubmates, but cruelly inconsiderate of their help; some are kind and thoughtful of everybody save those nearest to them, and it may be a long time after one has consecrated his life to something very much nobler than the mere saving of his own soul before he comes to know his human self well enough even to undertake to bring every word and act into subjection to the spirit of Christ. 'His sense of Love has measured but a little are of duty's full circle, and though a vision of the sweetness of a ministering life has sometimes appeared to him, he has not known how to attain unto it. To all such Christian Science comes as a great revelation of the eternal fact that Love alone can fulfil the law of right living, and "uncover," as Mrs. Eddy has said, "the myriad illusions of sin" (Science and Health, p. 572).

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