Article August 30, 1993 Issue

God's love heals and satisfies

Compulsive behavior and addictions can be healed through the power of divine Love.

Edith H. Seymour

To feel God's love is to feel taken care of. And it's to want to share this love with others. Expressing the unselfishness and tender care that spring from divine Love can help to obliterate selfish materialistic interests, the breeding ground of sensualism and sin.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "The so-called pleasures and pains of matter perish, and they must go out under the blaze of Truth, spiritual sense, and the actuality of being. Mortal belief must lose all satisfaction in error and sin in order to part with them" (p. 296). And mortal belief has no power to engulf us in an intense preoccupation with matter when the joy of spiritual loving and living takes over in our consciousness.

Love never fails. This was Paul's promise to the followers of Christ Jesus in Corinth, who lived surrounded by the deep discontent and agitation of sensual behavior. A Commentary on the Holy Bible, edited by J. R. Dummelow, describes Corinth under the Roman Empire as a great commercial clearinghouse and states: "The Corinthians were notorious even in the world of that time for their drunkenness and sensuality. ... It is a significant commentary on their way of life that a man of Corinth was usually introduced on the stage in a state of intoxication, and that 'to live like a Corinthian' had become a proverb to express a life of luxury and licence."

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