The yearning for changeless love seems almost universal. Mortals long for the love that will not lessen, for that deep affection which, in whatsoever reversal of circumstances, will remain throughout all time unaltered in its intensity and unchanged in its constancy. Manifestly, changeless and enduring love is a quality only of divinity; and John's assertion that "God is love," repeated by Mrs. Eddy with a new significance, brings deepest satisfaction to the troubled heart. But what of the affection which often is expressed in human relations, so pure, so exalted that its source seems near the throne of infinite good, where only abide the perfect qualities of divine Love? We know that the purest type of affection results from the highest concept of the divine; it is the love which is the reflection of divine Love, the almighty and infinite Father-Mother.
Certain types of human affection, based upon a material concept of existence, having its source in the belief that man and the universe are material, pure as it often seems to be, is sometimes extraordinarily unstable, and, because of its unreal nature and its uncertain source, may give place to hatred, perhaps equally intense. The foundation of such sentiment was not laid in Truth, but in error; not in the understanding of God, who is unchanging, eternal, all-inclusive Love, but in a supposititious opposite to this divine Love and its universe. In consequence, this type of affection pertains only to a seeming state which, being false in itself, can by no means produce a stable and permanent quality or attribute. The poet declared:—
"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."
