Article May 24, 1930 Issue

Love and Power

RALPH J. CARNEY

Compassion, gentleness, loving-kindness, tenderness, are always coincident with real power. Christ Jesus, the strongest and noblest character the world has ever known, was kind and compassionate, humble and tender, in his dealings with his fellow men; and it is clearly revealed in Christian Science that his mighty works were the outcome of his great unselfed love and divine gentleness. It is likewise evident that there is no way to repeat those works, even in the least, except through the demonstration in some degree of that same selfless love.

On page 514 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy, our beloved Leader, tells us that "tenderness accompanies all the might imparted by Spirit." And on page 367 of the same priceless work she writes of "legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love." Throughout all her writings she iterates and reiterates the supreme necessity that we should endeavor to manifest spiritual love in all our thoughts and acts. However much we may study, the letter of Science will profit us nothing unless we strive so to live that our arguments and declarations of Truth are borne on angel wings of pure, unselfish love. In "A Rule for Motives and Acts" (Church Manual, Art. VIII, Sect. 1) she points to the blessed fact that in spiritual reality and the eternal continuity of being, man is under no government whatsoever save that of divine Love.

The world's quest for power seems unending. Men are constantly striving to invent more powerful engines, to harness more effectively the so-called forces of nature, to protect themselves from the raging of storm and flood, to discover remedies that will give them dominion over disease, to peer behind the veil that hides the source of so-called life in matter and thus prolong it. But never in all their materialistic endeavors have they gained even a hint of the irresistible power which lay behind Christ Jesus' simple "Peace, be still," to the storm on the Sea of Galilee, or of the reason for his calm assurance when the multitude was fed with a few loaves and two small fishes. Never has materialism known anything like the power that made so effective his words, spoken to the leper, "I will; be thou clean," or that made potent his command to the son of the widow of Nain, "Young man, I say unto thee, Arise."

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The Christly Method
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