LOVE'S EXALTATION

John B. Willis

In his thrice-repeated inquiry of Peter, "Lovest thou me?" the Master was addressing a disciple whose devotion had proved to be pitifully impulsive and unreliable. More than this, he was emphasizing for all time and all professed Christians the divine insistence that love shall be genuine; that Truth can tolerate no pretense; that, however simple the offering, it must be neither deformed nor marred. There is thus brought to awakening thought the need of thoughtfulness respecting the quality of one's affections.

We may feel hurt, as did Peter, by the intimations involved in Truth's persistent questioning, but this sensitiveness argues for rather than against the propriety of a careful examination on our part respecting the genuineness of our loving, since in no matters are we more subject to self-deception than in those of the heart. No plea is so likely to receive a favorable hearing at the bar of our judgment as that entered in behalf of some loved object, and we cannot be true to our need or to the scientific spirit if we hesitate to submit the heart of our devotions to the test of Truth.

How frequently is it said, "I love you," when the sum and substance of the asserted attachment is nothing more than a personal liking, the glamour, perchance, of a mere physical attractiveness. Indeed so long as selfhood is identified with or at least made to include the body, this sense deception is not only possible but invitable; and yet no intelligent Christian can think of love, the only true love as Christ Jesus defined it, without perceiving that no element of physicality pertains thereto. Our Lord's supreme command involves the at-one-ment of love to God and love to our brother. He taught that the only wise for a Christian to love is God-wise. Frequently he expressed the thought to his disciples that he loved them with the Father's love for him, and that they were to continue this loving, and thus continue his work. To love divinely is the highest spiritual activity, an activity which is impossible apart from the recognition of man in God's image, and that compassion for mortals which this recognition engenders.

Upon the human sense plane love's beginning is physical, and as such its promised satisfactions are as sure to fail as its basis is sure to decay. This is no less true of one's relation to his parents and children than it is of his relation to his wife. As thought is lifted we recognize higher qualities, the winsomeness of goodness, purity, intelligence, spirituality; and knowing man as the perfect embodiment of these qualities, the Master healed the sick, and in his healing taught mankind how to love aright. This exaltation and beneficent activity of love is the consummate feature of Christian Science. Says our Leader, "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals." His atonement is "the evidence of divine, efficacious Love," which "fulfils the law of Christian Science" (Science and Health, pp. 476, 497, 572).

Real love for one means the embrace of that one in the consciousness of truth ; this is the test we are to apply, the standard we are to maintain in the instance of every liferelation, and it means house-cleaning for the most of us in the whole range of our affections. "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." In the light of Christian Science this saying of St. John has a wondrously new, deep meaning. It hews severely to the line, and if we would bless and be blessed in our loving, we must yield our every thought to the cleavage of its keen edge. To love aright is to recognize, rejoice in and express the divine. This is the love of Christ, "shed abroad" in our hearts, and it makes possible our inspiring part in the healing of humanity.

John B. Willis.

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