Article October 25, 1924 Issue

Love

LATITIA CORNELL HERRLING

Many of us may recall that when we first approached the study of Christian Science our attention was called to the requirement that we accept and demonstrate the fact that God is Love. We were reminded that this divine Love, reflected in our lives, would so change our concept of love that we would of necessity follow the admonition of the Bible and love our neighbor as ourselves.

To many of us who were then lost in the maze of material thinking, this seemed an impossibility. Our highest sense of love at the time was one that relied upon the physical senses for expression, and so was constantly changing. The loved one of to-day, by an act which met with our displeasure, might be the object of our hatred to-morrow. There was nothing in all our worldly experience to lead us to believe that love could not change to hatred. In fact, it was a thing we greatly feared,—that we might lose the love of those we loved.

What a sense of peace and calm comes as one glimpses the great eternal truth that love is wholly spiritual, not dependent upon matter in any way. One begins to recognize the love of man for God as spiritual; and when he reads in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 481), "Through spiritual sense only, man comprehends and loves Deity," it frees him from further endeavor to comprehend the love of God through material thinking. No longer striving for the impossible, he finds comfort and freedom in the teachings of Christian Science. By watching and examining his thoughts, he brings them into conformity with the law of God, and learns, as Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 272), "It is the spiritualization of thought and Christianization of daily life, in contrast with the results of the ghastly farce of material existence; it is chastity and purity, in contrast with the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism and impurity, which really attest the divine origin and operation of Christian Science." His question, Who is my neighbor? is rewarded with the realization that the act of a stranger, after the manner of the good Samaritan, may indeed be the act of a neighbor. The brotherhood of man becomes more than an empty phrase to him, and opportunities to do good are no longer evaded through selfish interests. He injures no man, and is blessed in proportion as he is guided by divine wisdom.

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