Editorial August 31, 1929 Issue

Life as Love

Albert F. Gilmore

NOTHING ever written has thrown more light upon the deific nature and attributes than Mrs. Eddy's use of the seven synonyms for God given on page 465 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." When each is considered, both in its intrinsic meaning and in its relationship to all the others, an illumination of God's nature and purpose is had, of priceless importance to mankind. According to this description, God is Life, eternal and changeless, and infinite Love, imparting its transcendent qualities to the whole universe, to the entire creation, including man. This fact grasped in its full significance would, indeed, destroy the whole round of belief in evil, in all materiality, in everything unlike Life and Love.

God is Life, and God is Love. Life is expressed in existence, eternal, imperishable, in life which knows no death, for God's ideas are coeternal and coexistent with God. Love is manifested in loveliness, in spiritual harmony and peace which knows no hate, nothing unlike Love. Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, p. 17), "Love is reflected in love," preclude the possibility of hatred or any phase of malevolence ever entering into the realm of reality, where Love alone presides. These spiritual facts translated into human experience mean this: To love, that is, to reflect the Love which is God, is to live, and, per contra, to hate is to die. Since Love is infinite and all Life, there is no true existence apart from God; that is, there is no death. But, when mortals fail to hold consciously to the fact of man's forever expression of Life and Love, they depart from the way of Life; they accept as true the illusion that life inheres in matter and is always expressed in some manner of material existence.

To indulge in the belief of hate, then, is to believe that evil is real; that materiality is substance, into which life enters and out of which it passes through the experience termed death. How truly, in the light of this reasoning, may it be said, that to hate is to die! In Christian Science it is learned that death is but a false sense; and—glorious fact!—that because Life is God, God's image, His likeness, man, never dies, never departs from the primal and eternal state in which God created him.

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