Article June 27, 1953 Issue

HAVING BUT ONE AFFECTION

W. BURTON WEBSTER

There is a difference in meaning between affection and love in the commonly accepted connotation of the words. The shade of difference is indicated thus in a dictionary of English synonyms: "Affection is kindly feeling, deep, tender, and constant, going out to some person or object, being less fervent and ardent than love, whether applied to persons or things."

The author of the Christian Science textbook, Mary Baker Eddy, also made a distinction between affection and love when she listed affection as characterizing the period of transition from mortal mind to the immortal, from the material to the spiritual, and classified love as belonging to spiritual reality (see Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 115, 116). Here our Leader ranks affection with honesty, compassion, and meekness; love is allied to wisdom, purity, and spiritual understanding.

We may therefore think of affection as a human trait which, when exercised and expanded, develops into love, a love untainted with matter or limitation. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (p. 201): "The best sermon ever preached is Truth practised and demonstrated by the destruction of sin, sickness, and death. Knowing this and knowing too that one affection would be supreme in us and take the lead in our lives, Jesus said, 'No man can serve two masters.'" How important it is, then, for us to have a correct sense of love and affection and to make sure that one affection is supreme in our lives, crowding out all selfishness, other gods, and false ambitions!

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