There is no word, in perhaps any language, which has been used with so loose a definition as love. This definition has been stretched between divinity and sensuality, with the result that the author of the Fourth Gospel, a man most careful of definitions, was driven to contrast two Greek words, in a famous passage, in order to make his meaning entirely clear, whilst Tyndale, breaking away from Wycliffe, substituted lovers for friends in his translation of Luke, "And ye schalbe betrayed of youre fathers and mothers, and youre bretheren, and kynsmen, and lovers, and some of you shall they put to deeth," only to be broken away from in turn, by Cranmer and the revisers, in a return to friends. The fact, of course, is that the use of the word, in the Johannine Epistles, as a synonym for God, cannot be made to tally with the significance given to it by the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers of the century in which the Epistles were written. It would seem, therefore, that their author must have deliberately impounded the word, and given a metaphysical intention to it, thus completely justifying one of the most far-reaching statements made by Mrs. Eddy, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where, on page 275, she says, "The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,—that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle."
It is necessary for every student of Christian Science to get Mrs. Eddy's meaning in this passage entirely clear, for it is certain that until the fact that Love is a synonym for Principle or God is grasped in its metaphysical implication, it must be impossible to track the course of love, as an attribute of Principle, running through the entire manifestation of divine creation. It is futile to proclaim Love as the theoretical basis of all demonstration, and then not to manifest love in the practice of that demonstration. God, Elohim, is Love, the Father and Mother of all spiritual creation. But this creation must and can exist only in Principle, therefore God, Love, and Principle become synonymous each for the others. Now it is obvious that Love is not a finite form; in other words, that it cannot exist apart from Mind. Nor is it possible to conceive of God, Principle, as manifesting anything except supreme wisdom and intelligence; in other words, as anything but Mind. Consequently God, Love, Principle, and Mind become synonymous terms, the divine Father and Mother of all that actually exists.
God, then, being Love, can be reflected in nothing but love, and, as a consequence, nothing but love can be discernible in the spiritual universe. This is "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." This process of deduction is quite simple to the human mind. The trouble with that mind lies in its inability to realize its own nothingness, and to perceive that all that really exists of man is the reflection of divine Mind. Matter is entirely nonexistent. That is to say, what appears to be the human body is only a subjective condition of the human mind. The good qualities, consequently, which the human being manifests are really reflections of the divine Mind, and wherever manifested must be the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. The natural scientist has no difficulty in admitting the entire unreality of matter as a phenomenon. Where his difficulty arises is in the inability to separate the divine Mind from the human mind, and so to realize that every true manifestation of love radiates from Principle, and not from the human mind. This is what Paul meant when in writing his second letter to the Corinthians he declared, "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."
The temporal, then, is the subjective condition of the human mind, which human mind is itself temporal, inasmuch as it is the counterfeit of the divine Mind, which is the only reality. This divine Mind is the real and the eternal, and the ideas which proceed from it constitute spiritual creation. Inasmuch, however, as it is impossible for the material to cognize the spiritual, the spiritual and eternal must remain unseen by materiality. Now, "a lie," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 17 of "Unity of Good," "has only one chance of successful deception,—to be accounted true. Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem part of eternal Truth." The exposure, then, of the lie of materiality brings materiality to an end in the degree of the exposure. That is why Christ Jesus said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." This ability to obtain freedom through the understanding of Truth is one of the strongest proofs that God, Principle, is Love. For no greater love could well be manifested than the gift of that knowledge of the truth which, in freeing men from the belief in the reality of matter, reveals to them their spiritual reality as the sons of God.
It is this severance between spiritual Love and its counterfeit material love which the writer of the Fourth Gospel attempted to put into human expression by the use of two separate Greek words. The one word (ảуaπảω) indicates the metaphysical perception of Truth which takes away the sins of the world; the other (Φtλέω) summed up the sense of human affection and passion which presses the lie of material reality upon the object of its devotion. The great demonstration which lies before the student of Christian Science who has begun to realize what this means is, while destroying his own material, sensuous ideal of love, not to adopt a merely academic sense of Principle, in the idea that he understands divine Love. All metaphysical healing is accomplished through an understanding of Principle, Love, for it is this understanding of Love which is the knowledge of the truth that destroys error or the belief in sensuous existence. The love manifested by Christ Jesus showed itself in its universality. It was not confined to his own race or to his own kindred: it embraced the whole world. If it had not been for this, it would have been limited, and so could not have reflected infinite Mind. As it was, it was extended to his friends and to his enemies alike, and never showed itself more clearly than in the sorrow of the human Jesus for the terrible sufferings he saw before those who, by reason of some material passion or another, rejected the Christ. In this sorrow there was, however, no iota of emotion. Emotion is the concomitant of the passions of the human heart. Jesus' sorrow sprang from his perception of the trouble which lying, lustful, revengeful materiality was heaping upon itself. His effort did not take the form of a futile attempt to save the importunate and unrepentant sinner from the consequence of his wrongdoing, but of an effort to teach him the truth which would free him from the belief in passions which, as long as he clung to them, were bound, sooner or later, to bring about his undoing. As Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 25 of Science and Health, "Implicit faith in the Teacher and all the emotional love we can bestow on him, will never alone make us imitators of him. We must go and do likewise, else we are not improving the great blessings which our Master worked and suffered to bestow upon us. The divinity of the Christ was made manifest in the humanity of Jesus."
A cold indifference to human wrongdoing is a sign of certain phases of human philosophy, but it is not a proof of any understanding of Principle. The more the human sense of things vanishes, and the divine becomes apparent, the more, in other words, the individual attains of the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, the clearer must become the pity for humanity and the ambition to show it how to escape from the lies which are besetting it. It is this which constitutes a real love of humanity, for it is the incentive to this that causes a man to lay down his own materiality in taking up the cross which Jesus declared would be the burden of all those who preferred spiritual truth to the sensuality of ease in matter. Christ Jesus was himself the foremost exemplar of all this means. Paradoxically, he knew enough to exchange the belief of physical existence for the understanding of life in Mind, Principle. Yet his very knowledge of Truth forced him to take up the cross from which, on the summit of Calvary, he proved to the world, in the face of its fears and hate, the domination of the power of Love. Nothing but an intense love of humanity could possibly have enabled him to confront the savage brutality and selfishness of the world for whose sake he endured the crucifixion. To imagine, in the face of the demonstration of the crucifixion, that spiritual Love can be academic in its indifference to suffering, on the ground that suffering is a dream of the human race, is utterly to misunderstand divine metaphysics. The love of God is something as distinct from the love of man as Principle is detached from human idealism. The real Christian Science practitioner, though steadfastly denying the reality of sorrow, and sickness, and sin, recognizes that the human being, ignorant of Principle, can only be saved from that ignorance through the understanding of Principle, which is Love. "The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 367 of Science and Health, "pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love."
