Article November 14, 1970 Issue

How to Love Enemies

JULIA IRENE FITZGERALD

Of all Christ Jesus' teachings perhaps the hardest for mankind to understand and fulfill is his command, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you."^{Matt. 5:44;}

To love a hateful, sinful mortal who has maliciously hurt one would seem to be a pretty big order for most people. According to this command of the Master's is one required to love persecution and hate? No, indeed, for the great Way-shower never condoned evil any more than he condemned men. He did not gloss over or ignore sin but was very firm and courageous in denouncing it, as he was when he overthrew the table of the money changers, whom he drove out of the temple, saying, "It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves."^21:13; He stood up to error and often openly rebuked it, but his purpose was to heal, to separate the evil act from the individual's real identity.

Christian Science, which reinstates Christ Jesus' healing method, shows us that man, the real self, is spiritual and entirely innocent of all the sins and sufferings of mortality. It teaches that all human weaknesses and discordant conditions are mesmeric illusions of material sense and unreal and impossible in the divine kingdom of Spirit, the only real creation. When we see man in this true light, in all the glory of his real selfhood, we cannot help loving him, for he is actually the loved of Love, God. To love an enemy, then, is to see him as he actually is, a child of God, and to want to awake him to this heritage. To have an enemy is to hold in thought the wrong concept of man, a conception entirely different from the true idea of man as divine Mind's reflection.

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