Article May 1, 1948 Issue

THE CHARITY OF TRUE KNOWING

ELIZABETH FARMER WHITE

Spiritual loving, spiritual knowing, heals, frees mankind from the limitations of the five physical senses. The mere execution of good deeds does not necessarily mean that one is loving or charitable. One may go about daily duties, give much time or money to some organization, attend church meetings, and yet have little of one charity in his thought. The Apostle Paul recognized that it is not sufficient merely to give material things or perfunctorily to do good deeds when he said to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:3), "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing."

To know man as he is, is to love him. And to love is charity in the highest sense of the word. Christian Science teaches that mortal existence is but a mistaken concept of man, who is the image and likeness of God, divine Love. If we are seeing man as a mortal living in a material world, in fact if we are seeing him as anything less than spiritual and Godlike, we are not truly loving our fellow man. Pure love conceives of all God's creation as spiritual and perfect, never touched or tainted by the ugliness of the mortal dream of sickness, sin, and death.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy says (p. 519, "Mortals can never know the infinite, until they throw off the old man and reach the spiritual image and likeness." We "throw off the old man" by rejecting every suggestion which claims that man is a sinning, resentful, dishonest, sick, or dying mortal; and we lay hold on immortality by clinging to the fact that Love is the only presence and power, and that man. Love's image, is pure, honest, upright, and whole. True knowing is insistent and persistent in the reiteration of these facts.

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