There is perhaps no passage in the Bible which is better known than that famous verse in the first letter to the church in Corinth, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Whether charity is the best translation of the original, or whether the revisers of 1885 were well advised in adopting the word love, is no mere matter of scholarship. The variation between the two contains a deep metaphysical lesson which the superficial reader is apt to pass over. One of the greatest Greek scholars of our own times has pointed out that the Greek word has a peculiar religious ethical meaning. It was a perception of this which induced the revisers of 1611 to reject Tyndale's rendering of love and return to Wyclif's adoption of the word charity.

The fact is that the Jacobean translators perceived something that was quite clear to the greatest thinker of their age, perhaps of any age, that "because of the indifferencie and aequiuocation of the word Loue with impure Love," it had failed to express the meaning of the apostle. Unfortunately, the revisers could not impart to those without ears to hear, their own spiritual perception of what the change meant. Just as the true sense of love had been lost in the physical sense, so the true sense of charity was, in turn, lost in the material act of almsgiving, so impossible is it for the human mind to regard things metaphysically. Faced with this narrowed vision of the Christ, the revisers of 1885 returned to the rendering of Tyndale, of Cranmer, and of Geneva. It is only necessary to quote perhaps the most perfect extant translation of the passage to show what the materialization of the apostle's wonderful words has lost to humanity:—

Substitute the word charity for love in this passage, and it will be seen to what a level of degradation the passage has been brought by a lack of metaphysical analysis.

The fact, indeed, which emerges from such an analysis, is the interdependence of the words love and charity. The larger sense of the word charity begins to be apparent, and it becomes possible to understand what the medieval writers had in view when they adopted the word "charitie." From the twelfth century, charity was commonly a synonym for either God's love for man or man's love for God. Its employment in this sense begins in 1175, and extends down certainly to 1846. Its use in the sense of almsgiving is purely subsidiary. The writer of the first epistle of John, using love as a synonym for God, declares, "God is love," or, as Wyclif translates it, "God is charitie." The word love, used there as an attribute of God, means then, love of Love. Now it is quite impossible to love scientifically without understanding what you are loving; anything else is a mere unreasoning animal attraction, which is about as far removed from what the Greek of the New Testament means by love as anything could be. True love, then, in its "religious-ethical" sense, means without question, an understanding of divine Principle. Substitute the word charity for love, and you have a view of charity about as far removed from promiscuous almsgiving as is imaginable. The new tongue of the Bible begins to unfold to you. You stand, as it were, on the summit of Pisgah, and get some view of the infinity of Christian Science.

Ruskin once commended the beggars with their tin plates, at the doors of the continental cathedrals, to the English tourists. Be sure, he said, that you deserve to give, whether or not they deserve to receive. A more frankly immoral suggestion from a great moralist, it would be difficult to imagine. It constitutes the unworthiness of the donor an obligation for an unworthy gift. As a matter of fact, indiscriminate charity is the very antithesis of love. If the parable of Dives and Lazarus means one thing more than another, it is what Mrs. Eddy means when she writes, on page 265 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "The pains of sense are salutary, if they wrench away false pleasurable beliefs." This, of course, does not in the least mean that there is no such thing as wise almsgiving; but almsgiving, if it is to be wise, must always, like physical healing, be accompanied by the effort to explain what true substance is. It can scarcely be termed healing to get a man's body well, and leave his mentality unprotected against the intimations of disease which mortal mind is always showering. In the same way, it is very little good, it may casily be positively harmful, to supply a man's material wants while leaving him unconscious of the true source of supply. The one is as much healing as the other, and so Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 358 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "The student who heals by teaching and teaches by healing, will graduate under divine honors."

When Jesus said, "Him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also," he could not very well have meant it literally. Such an action would very soon have left respectable humanity the target for disreputable humanity. He did presumably mean, if a man ask you for charity, give him what he needs, but give it to him also with that true sense of charity which is love, so that he may come to understand what substance truly is. We must never attempt to remove the landmarks of God. Progress, Mrs. Eddy truly says, should be painless, but a relief from suffering which inculcates a belief in ease in matter may be dearly paid for. Charity is love, and love is a realization of man's spiritual birthright. If any one doubts this, let him stay to think if it is possible to show greater love to any man than to realize his spiritual being, since this would help to free him from all the claims of the senses. "Jesus," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 476 of Science and Health, "beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." Is not this a parallel to that famous saying of Jesus, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"? Just so, in other words and at another time, he said, "For their sakes I sanctify myself."

This being so, real charity is a realization, like love, of man's spiritual birthright. This birthright suffering humanity is only too willing to sell for a mess of pottage. So far from permitting this, the really charitable man will endeavor to make his alms no mess of pottage, but an understanding of spiritual life, of what Mrs. Eddy terms the real man, which will free a man from poverty in the only way in which man can be freed, by giving him dominion over the senses, so that with the power to gratify them comes a realization of their unreality which makes gratification an impossibility. He who found the Roman tribute-money in a fish's mouth, could have found the gold of Ophir just as easily. He who fed the peasants on the shore of Galilee, could have reproduced Belshazzar's feast without an effort. Paradoxical as it may seem, those feats, easy as they would have been, were none the less an impossibility to him. While the man clothed in the shadowy authority of Cæsar feasted in the pretorium, the one who wielded the authority of God fasted in the desert. While Agrippa was carried through the streets of Cæsarea in his litter, Jesus was tramping the Galilean hills. While the high priests slept in luxury in their houses, he sat beneath the stars on the mount of Olives.

Jesus drew no distinction between the material misery of Lazarus and the spiritual barrenness of Dives; both were poverty to him. He did not say that poverty was a sign of spirituality any more than that riches were. But he did imply that when the two dreamers in matter woke to the realization that man dies not, the wretchedness of Lazarus might have diminished that sense of materiality which the luxury of Dives had only aggravated. "But meanwhile faith, and hope, and love last on, these three, but the best of them is" charity.

Copyright, 1913, by The Christian Science Publishing Society.