LOVE AND LAW

John B. Willis

The first and most important thing for every little one to learn, is the unyielding nature of true love, and the future of the child whose parents are not wise enough or not strong enough to impart this lesson, is apt to bring him unhappiness if not defeat. To allow a child to grow up with the thought that love consents to his wilfulness and indulgence, is to do him a very great wrong, since he cannot even begin to live aright until he has come to understand that love means unflinching loyalty to the right, to wisdom.

Upon a more mature plane of experience this same lesson must be learned by us all respecting the love of our heavenly Father, that it cannot consent to the unideal; that the law of Love is the law of Truth. Then we come in touch with the Science of being and are able rightly to interpret the Scripture which saith, "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." The divine manifestation is scientific and saving, its human statement perfectly intelligible in the light of Science. The divine government is forever expressed in the maintenance of the immutability of Love, the integrity of Truth.

Our afflictions witness primarily to the presence of error in individual thought, or in that mortal mentality into which we were born and over the belief of which we have not yet fully demonstrated. Further, in so far as we are spiritually apprehensive and aspiring, afflictions should bear witness to the uncompromising stand of divine Truth, which will not let us alone, but punishes us in the sense that it cannot look upon error with the least degree of allowance. "If I make my bed in hell," says the psalmist, "behold, thou art there,"—there to assert and maintain the law of good, the law of Love; and realizing this we can say with Job, "Though he slay me [the mortal sense], yet will I trust in him."

All sorts of discomforts may attend the schoolboy's present inability to apply the law involved, so as to solve his problem. This speaks of course for his lack of knowledge, which is to be regretted. It also speaks for the fact that truth remains forever true, it will not yield its scepter of harmonious rule to any presentation of error, which fact is manifestly the student's greatest occasion for rejoicing. The sooner therefore he understands the significance of this immutability of truth, and begins to be glad for his failures when in the wrong, the sooner will he know and be able to exercise truth's sovereign authority over error.

Examined in the light of our Lord's teaching respecting the relation of truth to error in human consciousness, Mrs. Eddy's statement that "trials are proofs of God's care" (Science and Health p. 66), is seen to be blessedly true. Not that suffering is planned for and being utilized by our heavenly Father as a necessary factor in our spiritual development, but that in our struggle out of materiality our true selfhood is protected, preserved from every corroding touch by virtue of God's trueness to His inherent nature, to the law of Love, which law is forever expressed through man.

When thus seen, the immutability and persistence of the right, the good, become the sufferer's strength and support in all his struggle for the attainment of the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. If divine law could be compromised, the trials of the aspiring might, in a sense, seem to be greatly lessened. If conscience were to let wrong-doers alone, their comfort would for the present be greatly increased, but that the voice within cries out unceasingly to the prodigal, and will not give him peace, is, and must become to him, the abiding evidence of the tender, protecting presence of the law of Love.

John B. Willis.

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