Article November 1, 1919 Issue

Upon first thought, few people would be likely to say, if...

The Christian Science Monitor

Upon first thought, few people would be likely to say, if asked, that love is the one enduring fact. Indeed, the senses testify upon every hand that love is the thing most buffeted in actual experience, most betrayed and disappointed; and yet it would be difficult to imagine any human being so submerged in cynicism or degradation as to be forever impervious to a genuine expression of love. Jesus' experience with the demoniac removes any doubt about that. This victim of evil belief, so extreme that it represented almost the sum of divine Love's opposite, and which cried out against the approach of Truth, yielded at once to the authority of divine Love, as expressed through Jesus the Christ. However men may fancy, in their devious antagonisms and bitternesses, that love has perished from experience, the longing for love remains; and this is doubtless what the wise man realized when he declared, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."

Divine Love is the enduring fact; and the only reason that men have not more often been satisfied with its baptismal healing power is because they have sought and have given one another only a human sense of love, the best they know, perhaps, but none the less a transitory quality that loses its value, if too severely tried, and turns to hate. The reason that mankind perpetually long for Love is not because of any permanent satisfaction to be found in human love when it is won, for that is temporal, if not inconstant, but because divine Love, or Principle, is the central fact of being, and the human heart, consciously or unconsciously, yearns for the spiritual source. This human longing was answered once and for all in the advent and the works of Jesus the Christ. Love, as divine Principle, was the supreme truth which he revealed; it was the basis of his words and miracles; his pure understanding of it was the only secret contained in his mighty triumphs, and this secret he unfolded for all to possess and use. Of the purpose of his work, Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 19), "Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus' teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death, by the law of Spirit,—the law of divine Love."

The human mind does not take kindly to the idea of loving according to law. It wishes to love as it pleases; and it is because it insists upon loving as it is moved by impulse and caprice, that its sense of love must always run dry and its gardens of delight turn to wastes and desolation. This false sense of love is a fundamental error underlying all human discord, an error which Jesus' revelation of God as divine Principle was designed to correct. He declared that God is Father, and in this statement inheres the correlated fact that man is son, even if he had not explicity so explained man's relation to God. But this truth he disclosed in all his teaching and deeds, revealing spiritual man as the idea of Love, his nature as therefore loving, and his being perfect; and this right understanding of God's man stilled the storms of human passions and, consequently, quenched their penalties.

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