Article September 23, 1950 Issue

"AS I HAVE LOVED YOU"

WILLIAM PADGET

"To love one's neighbor as one's self, is a divine idea," says Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 88). Continuing she adds, "But this idea can never be seen, felt, nor understood through the physical senses." This broad hint that one must needs know how to love himself intelligently, that is to say divinely, before he can exercise the true, divine idea of Love in relation to his neighbor, brings to thought the admonition of the Master, Christ Jesus, concerning his second great commandment, in which he stressed the importance of loving one's neighbor as well as loving divine Love.

Loving one's human father or mother as separate or apart from the one Father, Mind, received a rebuke from Christ Jesus (Luke 14:26): "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, ... and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Self-love, as it is commonly understood, is loving a self apart from the spiritual, perfect, and only true self created by the Father. Loving a relative, or friend, or neighbor as a being separate from divine Principle, Love, is not a divine idea, but is a human belief and brings but the fruits of belief. To attempt to love one's neighbor for some personal advantage is to miss the true idea of loving.

The master Scientist emphasized the importance of loving aright. "Love one another; as I have loved you," said he (John 13:34). How to love another was as important to this great Teacher as how to worship or love the Father. His was a ministry of love. In teaching his followers how to love he made use of the greatest of all the Commandments, urged them to love the Lord with all the heart, all the soul, all the mind, and all the strength. That he was loving the Father according to this rule, and maintaining his constant unity with Him, was evidenced by such statements as the following: "I am in the Father, and the Father in me" (John 14:11); "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. ... That the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me" (John 17:20, 21, 23).

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