Editorial August 9, 1913 Issue

LOVE POINTS THE WAY

John B. Willis

Thoughtful people are becoming deeply impressed with the conviction that the social order embraces many facts and conditions which are altogether wrong, and that the spirit of Christian brotherhood, alone, can right them.

Christ Jesus sent forth his disciples with the single, all-inclusive, all-corrective mandate, "Thou shalt love." This was to fit and munition them for every possible situation and experience. They went out to meet the ignorance and torpidity of the common people, the caste pride and self-satisfaction of the Pharisees, the contempt and cruelty of the Roman legions. They were called to resist every assertion and accretion of selfishness and sensuality, to defeat every manifestation and power of evil; in a word, to overcome sickness and sin, death and hell, and their sole means both of attack and defense was to be love! Their enemies mustered millions, and they were impelled by all the instincts and inertia of material sense. They were backed by common consent and political authority, and they had every weapon of the world wherewith to work their will; yet twelve commoners were to conquer all through love, and because this love was "of God," they did.

How wonderful it seems, how unlike mortal planning and preparation for conquest, and how entirely in keeping with it is Mrs. Eddy's counsel to her students, as expressed in her well-known line, "Wait, and love more for every hate" (Poems, p. 4). This reliance upon Love alone, which Christ Jesus inculcated and which is reaffirmed in Christian Science, is very much more than the institution and maintenance of amiable relations with those about us. Love understood and made manifest is to be not only a legacy of joy and peace, but an instrument of efficiency, the means for the solution of all problems, the achievement of all that is good.

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