Editorial April 10, 1920 Issue

Philadelphia

Frederick Dixon

When Attalus II, King of Pergamos, was founding the famous city which he intended to be the seat of Græco-Asian culture in Lydia, indeed in Asia, he gave it the name of Philadelphia, meaning love of the brethren, in token of the unshaken loyalty and affection of the king for his own brother. From that day Philadelphia became, as it were, a missionary city. From it went forth every effort to spread the civilization of Hellas throughout Asia; and here, appropriately enough, was established one of the seven churches of Asia to which were sent the scrolls of Revelation, for distribution amongst the Christian communities of the continent.

The example set by the pagan king should have been at least an inspiration to Christendom; Christendom should have accepted the missionary spirit of the city, and should have carried the torch of brotherly love throughout the world. Some eighteen centuries passed, and the colonists of Pennsylvania, which took its name from William Penn, the friend and fellow worker of the Quaker, George Fox, founded in the New World a new city of Philadelphia. Like its ancient prototype, it was to be the City of Brotherly Love. Had not Penn promised this love to the red men, under the famous tree at Shakamaxon? In the end Philadelphia became very much what the Philadelphia in the Cogamis Valley had become centuries before it, a city of the slave trade. The ideals of the Quakers had petered out in the language of the worship of divus Cæsar. The story, extending over the whole of the Christian era and of the century and a half before it, affords an example of the frailty of humanity, and of the futility of human ideals. What the world should have learned from the experience is a doubt as to its own definition of love, to say nothing of the tragedy of its own accomplishment. But, as long as the world attributes to love a sensuous definition, so long will it fail to demonstrate the teaching of the Founder of the Christian religion, when he declared, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Now it has been pointed out often enough in the Christian Science periodicals, that the word translated life, used by Christ Jesus on this occasion, is not the ordinary word for life, but the word commonly translated soul; and that, moreover, this word soul meant the veriest animal instinct of existence, that which separates animate from what it is usual to describe as inanimate matter. Clearly, then, what Jesus was advising his followers to do was to exhibit to their friends not the carnal affection of the old dispensation, but that spiritual understanding of love, derived from a metaphysical knowledge of Principle. Only the man who surrenders his belief of life in matter to an understanding of Life as Principle, as Love itself, can ever hope to understand what the writer of the epistles of John meant when he said, "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love;" much less what Jesus himself meant when he told Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit." Yet the statements contain exactly the same truth: only as a man lays down his animality for his friends, does he put off the old man with his lusts, in other words, does he deny that which is born of the flesh; and the only way in which he can realize that which is born of the Spirit is as he learns to love, in other words, as he puts on the new man, which is his understanding that God, Spirit, is Love.

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