Article December 5, 1925 Issue

Loving My Neighbor as Myself

SARAH V. CORNELIUS

"YE shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour." The application of this Mosaic law in daily living is truly to love one's neighbor as one's self. When we refuse in our thought to personalize "the poor," those apparently struggling under the heavy weight of materiality, not yet awake to the untold wealth of omnipresent divine Love, when we are seeing man as the manifestation of spiritual right ideas, we are helping to lift the burden. When we refuse to "honour the person of the mighty," refuse to give so-called matter credit for anything, but hold instead to God as the only source of perfection, we are loosing the manacles that would bind our neighbor, whose real selfhood is already blessed with God-bestowed gifts. Jesus rebuked the thought that would hold goodness as personal by asking, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."

Loving our neighbor does not mean that we must shield error or condone apparent faults, but that, lovingly piercing the veil of human shortcomings, we are to "mark the perfect man, and behold the upright," knowing that the material senses do not testify to the true nature of God's child; knowing that the barnacles of hate, self-love, self-pity, self-justification painlessly loosen their hold in the clear-flowing waters of Truth and Love.

Loving our neighbor means keeping consciousness clear by daily drawing closer to God, so that when the cry, Help, Lord, or I perish! goes up from some fear-bound mortal, we may be ready to serve when called upon as God's representatives through whom the healing truth may be revealed.

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