Article August 3, 1935 Issue

"A truer sense of Love"

LAURENCE L. PARKER

A fable tells of a hen that found nothing to eat, although sitting on an open barrel of wheat. Busy contemplating the supposed lack of that which was at hand, she sat day after day getting thinner and thinner in the presence of plenty. How many people there are today like the fabled hen! Many, in the presence of God's bounty, are engrossed with the beliefs of lack: beliefs of lack of supply, lack of health, lack of harmony.

This story may remind us to open our eyes to the good which is all about us and which we often overlook. But let us consider it from another angel, from that of observing the hen. What would a lover of animals have done in the presence of this hen of fable? Would he have laughed at her foolish actions and said the silly hen deserved her plight for being so ignorant? Would he have thought to himself that she was always doing foolish things, and might as well suffer for this one, as she would perhaps do even worse next time? Would he not, rather, have shown her how and where to obtain the needed food, and perhaps even have prepared it for her?

So should the lover of mankind be deeply compassionate towards inharmonious one today. Not showing false sympathy for the physical state of affairs or for one's beliefs about them, not being in sympathy with the error or belief in its reality, where good alone exists, the Christian Scientist tenderly leads one's thought away from the physical to the spiritual, away from one's mistaken beliefs to the understanding of true existence.

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