WHEN the beloved disciple wrote the words "God is love," he gave to the world one of the most concise and illuminating pronouncements of Truth it had ever known. This simple sentence has echoed down the ages, carrying with it wonderment and hope to many a listening ear; and its beauty has appealed to all Christian students through the succeeding centuries. It has, indeed, been variously understood; for the creeds and dogmas which gradually took the place of the spiritual understanding which lay behind the works and words of Jesus, blinded men to its significance, and to the fact that it was of intensely practical import to suffering humanity.
An understanding of any subject is a necessary prelude to its satisfactory exposition or demonstration, and this is as true of religion as of any branch of so-called materialistic knowledge. It is, then, surely essential that mankind should have a true idea of the central theme of the religion of Christ, of the Love which John calls God, if it is to be proved of present practical value. The prevailing belief that God is a corporeal person has been largely responsible for the failure to understand the meaning of John's statement and the many implications involved in it. For the same reason, mankind has regarded the apostle's exhortation, "Beloved, let us love one another," largely as an appeal to sentiment, instead of perceiving that it has a scientific and logical relationship to his definition of God. That it could be obeyed to any great extent has seemed quite impossible; for love, conceived of as an attribute of a corporeal Deity, has seemed too idealistic and impractical to admit of demonstration by imperfect mortals.
Indeed, mortals do not readily grasp the nature of the Love which is God or the "manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us;" for they claim a material selfhood apart from God. This belief in a material selfhood limits their sense of God, of the universe, and of each other. Mortals see in others only that which is first admitted in their own thinking; and the sense they have of everything which comes into their experience is colored by the degree of materiality of their own sense of self. The love mortals are apt to express, dominated as they are by this personal sense of things, is but an emotion which, while it claims to afford them some personal pleasure, is subject to fear and changeability.
