Editorial March 28, 1925 Issue

The Transplanting of the Affections

Ella W. Hoag

Who in all the world has been satisfied with the fruitage of his affections? Who has not longed both to give and receive deeper, truer, more faithful loving-kindness? And yet rarely has it occurred to men to consider the wisdom or the necessity of transplanting their affections. They have not discerned that all that is unsatisfying and unfortunate in the affections and their blossoming has been because they have been wrongly planted; they have so frequently been growing in ground that is arid, unwholesome, and unproductive of real good. Paul said, "Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth;" but because men have understood neither what this meant nor how to obey it, they have looked upon it as "an hard saying."

Our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, explains both the difficulty and the remedy, when she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 265, 266), "The pains of sense are salutary, if they wrench away false pleasurable beliefs and transplant the affections from sense to Soul, where the creations of God are good, 'rejoicing the heart.' " In this statement she indicates very plainly that so long as the affections are grounded in material sense,—human belief, personal inclination,—only final suffering can result, since "false pleasurable beliefs" are the only outcome from such soil. Let the affections, however, be transplanted "from sense to Soul" and everything changes, since in Soul they must inevitably blossom into that understanding of the good creations of God which always rejoice the heart.

Now the students of Christian Science do not always awaken as fully or whole-heartedly as they might to the need of this transplanting process. They still seem to imagine they can go on with affections divided between matter and Spirit; they still appear to think they may unite satisfactorily such opposites as things material and things spiritual. Possibly the most prominent reason for this is the mistaken belief that if they plant their affections completely in Soul they will do so at the sacrifice of something that is desirable and good. So-called mortal mind is slow to admit that all real good belongs to God, that in Him is to be found all that is truly desirable, and that in giving Him the entire heart everything is gained and nothing can possibly be lost.

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