IT is comparatively easy for one to enumerate the myriad ways in which human love is made manifest: in giving and withholding; in sacrifice and surrender; in patience, tenderness, forgiveness, and so on through a list that would swell to large proportions if each should add his own special definition of what constitutes a genuine expression of love. Yet higher than merely human love, because the very source from which it springs, is Love divine; and a recognition of this, and its universality, leads one to enter a new world, for Love rightly understood meets every need of humanity.
To comprehend and appropriate it, we must look for a reflection of divine Love everywhere. There is no place where it is not, and what we diligently seek we are sure to find. Gazing up through the branches of an apple tree on some wondrous day in May, when they are filled with the dainty, fragrant blossoms that give such promise of bounteous fruitage, we see Love in its reflection. Listening to the song of the thrush at nightfall, and wonderingly rejoicing as the notes gush so melodiously from his swelling throat, the attuned ear recognizes the one universal Love that guides both him and the bird. To look with grateful eyes into the depths of the blue sky by day, or at night when the stars are serenely shining, each in its own allotted place, is reverently to acknowledge the inexhaustible Love that fills all space. If clouds pass over the sky, we still know that the light which they for a brief time obscure is forever unchanging. Then we remember that Love is eternal and unchanging also.
Love manifest is God manifest, and since God is All, there is therefore nothing manifest but Love. How true it is, and how often it is proved to every one, that "love suffereth long, and is kind," and that "love never faileth" (Rev. Ver.). Love "paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with starry gems, and covers earth with loveliness" (Science and Health, p. 247) . Surely back of all true love in its countless manifestations is almightiness, our Father, so that everywhere we, His children, may rest quiet under His guiding hand and be comforted, for the eternal God is our refuge, "and underneath are the everlasting arms."
