Article August 17, 1929 Issue

"The price of learning love"

ELIZABETH HAYWARD GARDNER

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."

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