Mankind has for ages been admonished by proverb and precept of the importance of loving one's neighbor. This admonition has been variously phrased; but it was through Moses that God gave it first to the children of Israel as a law, in the words, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Jesus, many centuries later, emphasized its importance by giving it second place in his reply to the lawyer's query as to which was the greatest commandment. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the early Christians at Rome, after enumerating various laws and duties, concludes with these words: "And if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Again, when writing to the Galatians, he declares, "All the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." James, who calls himself a "servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ," in his epistle to "the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad," designates these words as "the royal law." Twenty centuries later, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, declared in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 88), "To love one's neighbor as one's self, is a divine idea."
As we delve deeper into the Science of being, and, reflecting divine knowledge and intelligence, come to know and see the real spiritual man, we recognize that it would be impossible for us to have any feeling but love for God's ideal man. It is necessary, however, that before we can see or know other individuals aright, we must first learn to see ourselves at least in a degree as God sees us. We must refuse to identify ourselves with human belief. We sometimes seem to be unconscious of man's true identity; and like a person who is, according to belief, mentally deranged, and fancies himself to be some other person, so we claim to be that which we are not. If we have any doubt on the subject as to who we are, we should satisfy ourselves at the earliest possible moment, and begin to recognize our spiritual identity. We cannot realize that our real neighbor is a spiritual idea, unless we have begun to attain to that realization for ourselves.
Our Leader says in Science and Health (pp. 476, 477): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." But the Master had first to behold himself aright as the Son of God before the perfect man could appear to him. It is necessary for us, also, to begin to gain the right concept of ourselves—the true self, the ideal self, disrobed of false beliefs—before we can know how to love our neighbor as ourself. If we are attempting to love our own mortal sense of self, associated with its beliefs of material pains and pleasures, sensuality or sin, then to love our neighbor as we love this so-called self, with which we are seeming to identify ourselves, would be to disobey another law of the Mosaic Decalogue by bearing false witness against our neighbor, who, in truth, possesses none of these qualities, but is the perfect child of God. But when, through spiritual understanding, we begin to discern man's true nature, and are able to express in our daily experience something of this perfect idea of God, we are then ready to commence loving the neighbor aright as another individual idea of the one Mind; and this love extends to all ideas which we behold in the mirror of divine Science.
