Article December 5, 1959 Issue

LOVE THYSELF

ELEANOR OWERS SMITH

True selfhood is the expression of God; to love it is a divine idea. Christ Jesus exemplified this truth. In his remarkably concise and comprehensive summary of the law, he quoted as the second great commandment (Matt. 22:39), "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes of this commandment (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 88), "To love one's neighbor as one's self, is a divine idea;" and then she adds, "but this idea can never be seen, felt, nor understood through the physical senses."

The command to love oneself may seem startling until, through the teachings of Christian Science, one is enabled to distinguish clearly the difference between loving oneself and self-love. To know and be what God creates is to love oneself. God creates man as His idea, spiritual and incorporeal. One cannot love himself until he comprehends in some degree this great fact and endeavors to separate himself from a material concept of being.

Self-love, in contradistinction, is ignorance of God and His creation and is contrary to ideal human behavior. It suggests a mortal personality that expresses pride, conceit, and self-righteousness. Mrs. Eddy writes (ibid., p. 242): "Self-love is more opaque than a solid body. In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,— self-will, self-justification, and self-love, —which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death."

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