Article May 30, 1988 Issue

What is this thing we call love?

Popular notions about it don't really answer the question. But when an understanding of God does, we're sure to see love in a wholly new light.

Robert W. Jeffery

The word love is one of the most important words in our vocabulary. Yet it is one of the most overworked and least understood. Mrs. Eddy writes of it: "What a word! I am in awe before it. Over what worlds on worlds it hath range and is sovereign! the underived, the incomparable, the infinite All of good, the alone God, is Love."

By her capitalization Mrs. Eddy makes clear she is speaking of Love as one of the Scriptural names for the Supreme Being, God. But she goes on to show that her thought is also embracing the expression or quality called love. "By what strange perversity is the best become the most abused,—either as a quality or as an entity?" she continues. "Mortals misrepresent and miscall affection; they make it what it is not, and doubt what it is."^{Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 249–250.}

Today we are swamped with evidence of the truth of this statement. The term love is so crassly used that it is applied freely to cars, household appliances, even to commercial institutions. And we hear even the phrase "making love" in the most casual dialogue on television and in movies.

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