The Love that is God is the absolute consciousness of good alone. Our sense of love is as large as our understanding of the truth of the allness and goodness of God and of His creation, wherein all is lovable and loving.

That person does not necessarily express the most love who runs around picking up things that other people have dropped or doing little things for others which give them either a sense of helplessness or a sense of being overindulged. That individual expresses the most love who is most conscious of the goodness, the irreproachable goodness, of man united with God, who sees qualities of God reflected in the lives of his associates, who refuses to accept as fact unpleasant traits in others, not because he ignores or overlooks them, but because he consciously denies their identification with man.

The child of God is the only man this individual recognizes, and he glimpses this man wherever he looks. Suppose he meets anger in another, or stupidity, or negligence. He refuses to give anger, stupidity, or negligence place in his consciousness as marks of identification for anyone. He does not love another's anger. He does not love another's stupidity or negligence. He is not expected to love error, or evil, in any form. The bigness of his love is expressed in his God-endowed ability to refuse to identify man with evil traits. Rather does he identify man with such qualities as poise, intelligence, and respect for all that is good. He who is angry, stupid, or negligent is not God's man. The spiritualized consciousness, which denies reality to such traits, expresses the true love, the love that dissolves all erroneous concepts and frees humanity from the consequences of false beliefs. That individual expresses the most love who beholds creation as God, Love, beholds it.

If the phrase "that individual expresses the most love" is confusing, let the reader understand that this is a relative phrase, applicable only to the human concept. In the absolute reality of divine consciousness all of God's children express Love infinitely. In God's kingdom there is no "more" or "less," or "most" or "least," about it. "Comparing spiritual things with spiritual" (I Cor. 2:13), we find no degrees of love. Degrees of love indicate unreal human limitations.

Mary Baker Eddy states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 6): "'God is Love.' More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go." The world greatly needs the Christian Scientists' understanding and demonstration of the Love that is God. It needs their daily living of love. "Universal Love is the divine way in Christian Science," she tells us (ibid., p. 266). The reflecting of universal Love does not mean that we are to regard all races, nations, enemies, with an artificial, forced benevolence; it means that because God's universe is good and the only universe, including all, we are empowered to recognize good wherever we gaze. We are empowered to acknowledge good as the only power wherever we are, and thus to destroy evil through the spiritual understanding that it does not exist. We are empowered to know the universal brotherhood of God's children in Science.

We can know no enemy because no enemy exists in the Mind that is God, and therefore it can be no part of the consciousness that is man. If we keep running into enemies, it is because our gaze is directed at misconceptions and we have become pseudo creators of what is actually nothing. Our sense of the Love that is God must be big enough, strong enough, pure enough, to counteract all belief in enemies.

A false sense has effect only if we hold to it as real; and it affects only a false sense of being. The truth is true, no matter what we believe. How fatuous, and how needlessly tragic, to envelop ourselves in false, baseless concepts of man!

If we wish to disperse the sense of enemy—be it person, influence, or power—we will acknowledge to ourselves that the enemy appears only in our own misconception of man, and that the man of God is the only man there is. To be willing, eager, to realize that the one who appears as an enemy in our consciousness is actually God's man, reflecting His wisdom, spiritual love, substance, is to eliminate the sense of enemy, to become truly, consciously loving. By so doing we free humanity in ever-increasing measure from the burdens imposed by a false sense of man and power.

If we are manifesting the Love that is God, we are spreading a defense over our concept of man throughout the world. We shall not be aggressively embattled against false concepts when we love with the love that is of God, recognizing the man and the universe He creates and maintains, and understandingly declare this man and this universe to be the only creation. Doing this kind of loving daily, we shall uplift our concept of the world into peace and security.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," declared the Master (John 15:13). Spiritually understood, this means that we lay down all false, material concepts of life and bring to light the friend who is ever our brother, God's child. This is the love which is our precious gift to mankind.