Editorial April 23, 1921 Issue

"Strange perversity"

Gustavus S. Paine

BECAUSE divine Love is infinite, it must be infinitely expressed. No limited human concept can exemplify the totality of good. Each one is entitled to turn to Principle, divine Love, from his own standpoint, and to demostrate its infinity for himself. A man must recognize that his sense of truth is, at the best, but his sense of good, and not all there is to the infinite goodness of God. Others have right to their sense of truth likewise. No one has discerned and demonstrated the truth so exclusively as to have a monopoly of understanding. Charity, cooperation, and real fellowship are requisite to the exemplification of divine Love in daily experience. As Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 293), "The sum total of Love reflected is exemplified, and includes the whole duty of man: Truth perverted, in belief, becomes the creator of the claim of error."

To think that human hatred and brutality are love or can ever be evidence of love is to pervert the truth. Mortal mind, from its very nature, tries to distort and reverse; but, fortunately, mortal mind is nothing merely supposing itself to be something. In a little article called "Love" (Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 249-250) Mrs. Eddy writes: "What a word! I am in awe before it. Over what worlds on worlds it hath range and is sovereign! the underived, the incomparable, the infinite All of good, the alone God, is Love." There can be nothing more than the allness of good, divine intelligence spiritually manifest as harmonious action. Supposititius mortal mind's belief that the love of divine Mind can be turned into hate is illusion without any real basis. The all-inclusive divine consciousness produces and maintains only its spiritual manifestation. That is why it is loving. Its all-inclusiveness precludes any suppositional opposite from substituting itself for or successfully attacking the reality. The truth remains forever untouched by mortal beliefs.

In the passage just quoted Mrs. Eddy continues: "By what strange perversity is the best become the most abused,—either as a quality or as an entity? Mortals misrepresent and miscall affection; they make it what it is not, and doubt what it is. The so-called affection pursuing its victim is a butcher fattening the lamb to slay it. What the lower propensities express, should be repressed by the sentiments. No word is more misconstrued; no sentiment less understood. The divine significance of Love is distorted into human qualities, which in their human abandon become jealousy and hate." Each student of Christian Science needs, then, to distinguish clearly between infinite Love, which is Principle and invariably expresses itself as constructive action, and the so-called human love which soon degenerates into malice. Only by accepting the ever loving divine Mind as the sole producing and governing power, can one reject and prove the nothingness of the illusory supposition that would try to present itself throughout experience. The healing process is the replacement of suppositional perversity, whether physical, mental, or moral, with the calm and orderly expression of Truth.

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