Between the personal attribute called love and the Love which the beloved disciple assures us is God, there is a gulf as impassable as that which yawned between Dives and Lazarus. Nothing could be more unlike the exacting despotism of physical attraction than the all-embracing protection of divine Love. That which commonly poses for love in everyday human living cannot be love, for it springs from the belief of the attraction of personal qualities, and thus claims to make good resident in matter. Since the five material senses are incapable of cognizing aught outside their own realm, it is plain that whatever they testify to is sensuous or material, and therefore is not of God. "Wherefore," as Mrs. Eddy says of sensuous love in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 351), "it is hate instead of Love; for the five senses give to mortals pain, sickness, sin, and death,—pleasure that is false, life that leads unto death, joy that becomes sorrow. Love that is not the procurator of happiness, declares itself the antipode of Love; and Love divine punishes the joys of this false sense of love, chastens its affection, purifies it, and turns it into the opposite channels."

On page 108 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy makes the statement that "immortal cravings, 'the price of learning love,' establish the truism that the only sufferer is mortal mind, for the divine Mind cannot suffer." When, therefore, a harvest of unhappiness is gathered, let it be a warning to the sufferer that "the price of learning love" has not yet been paid.

That "immortal cravings" are an inalienable right of mankind must be conceded. The assertion of spiritual sense can no more be stifled by ignoring it than the sun can be blotted out by shutting the eyes to the light. This sense is the seed which "is in itself," thus forever manifesting its divine origin. It matters not how many ages of materialistic thinking have claimed to pile their mental debris mountain high, the immortal clamorings still persist. And just as the seed of the pine tree lodged in a cleft of rock bursts its little brown jacket and sends up a tender green shoot that by and by will split the mighty ledge, raise its lofty arms to heaven, and sift its fragrant incense over the mountain side, so the inextinguishable life of man, rooted and grounded in its infinite source, fed by the fountain of living water, is insistently rending the enswaddling robes of ages of false thinking, to the end that man shall stand revealed in all his glory of freedom and dominion. In his mighty epistle to the Romans, Paul writes: "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. . . . Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. . . . Even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body."

From the beginning mortal mind has claimed to clothe the spiritual idea in its own misconception of being. To lay aside the hampering garments of the five physical senses constitutes "the price of learning love." It is not to be supposed that the disrobing process will receive the ready consent of mortal mind. Ages of materialistic thinking have seemingly woven the veil of the flesh and its so-called laws and processes. Before it will yield its treasure box to be rifled and its house to be despoiled, the "strong man" must be bound.

In the effort to exchange the hampering beliefs of material sense for the realities of Soul, mankind must pass through three progressive stages, which Mrs. Eddy cites as "Physical," "Moral," and "Spiritual," and which she fully amplifies on pages 115 and 116 of Science and Health. The first stage may be said to be the kingdom "subjected to unreality, not of its own will, but for the pleasure of him who subjected it" (Translation of Romans by W. B. Rutherford)—the belief of physicality. The supposititious creator and ruler of this kingdom of unreality is the claim of life as existent in matter. The five physical senses are the avenues and instruments of its expression. When this ruler is forced to abdicate, every vestige of his kingdom vanishes forthwith like a puff of wind, for it is built up of unreality. Yet mankind may not leap at a single bound from the stage of physicality into full realization of man's spiritual birthright. As J. G. Holland puts it,

As the tiny green shoot yearns upward through the dark mold seeking the light, so mortal man, responding to "immortal cravings," climbs step by step the ladder of spiritual unfoldment in quest of man's divine sonship. As the bursting seed sheds its little brown jacket and puts forth tender leaves of living green, so the aspiring mortal at every rung of the ladder exchanges old garments for new. Physicality melts like the mist under a glowing sun, and the climber finds himself reclothed in garments of a different fiber. Passion and appetite, sickness, sin, and death—all the etceteras that accrue to a supposition divorced from God, good—constitute the discarded garments. The transitional moral qualities constitute the new.

The process of substitution does not take place without a struggle. Resistance to these "immortal cravings" makes up the sum total of the suffering of a mortal. Thereby does he pay "the price of learning love," for the establishment of the kingdom of God means the utter destruction of all falsity and unreality. Yet though humanity be in the throes of spiritual birth, Paul assures us that "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." Which is to say that the suffering endured as the false sense of man is laid off is not to be compared with the glory that awaits him who discerns and claims his divine sonship.

The qualities which take possession of our consciousness in this transitional stage unfold and ripen into sweeter and purer attributes. We find affection unfolding like an exquisite bud into the golden-hearted rose of love; we find meekness and compassion, hope and faith, honesty and temperance, all springing from the taproot of reality and leading on to spiritual understanding and power.

This is the true humanhood—the sinless humanhood—which, through Jesus, manifested the divinity of the Christ. In the third and last stage, mankind makes its final payment on "the price of learning love," for here mortal mind completely disappears in the absolute abdication of the material senses before the rising sun of spiritual understanding. Surely this is the state to which our Leader refers in her quotation on page 51 of "Miscellaneous Writings":