IN the chapter entitled "Creation" in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, are these arresting words (p. 266): "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love. . . . Universal Love is the divine way in Christian Science." This is "an hard saying" to some students, but we must remember that therein our Leader laid down no law of separation for us; rather, she told us only what she knew to be inevitable —that if we cling to personal sense instead of divine Principle disillusionment is sure to follow.
Who knew better than Mrs. Eddy that mortal sense has no power to satisfy; who more than she had proved it in her own life, when all she held most dear one by one passed from her experience? But her heart was reaching out towards universal Love, and the void was already filled. She learned all these things by her experiences; glorious spiritual experiences they became to her; and she would share these with us, and save us from distressing human experiences, as a loving parent might do. A mother yearns after her child, would bear its burdens, would make its way rosy and fair, if she could; but a wise mother knows that she must "loose him, and let him go." She must equip him, counsel him, sometimes uncover to him the evil of that which looks attractive, then leave to him the glory of overcoming.
We are all children, but we are not without our spiritual guides, the Bible and the Christian Science textbook. In studying them and obeying their teachings we can find difficulties forestalled, the way illumined, sorrows assuaged, for the indication is ever upwards and away from mortal sense. What is the love which reflects universal Love? Is it loving everybody? Yes, but it is much more than that. We are not asked to love sickness, hate, animal propensities, or even an attractive personality; and these in human experience are so knit with the human concept of man as to be almost inseparable in our thought of him. First we must discover what really to love, because whatever it is, it is everywhere. And what is everywhere but God and His reflection; what else has omnipresence or substance? We must love right ideas, then, the truth about man and the universe; and we must discount as false the sick, the sorrowing, the inharmonious, together with raging seas, destructive storms, perils, and replace our thought of them with realization of the perfection, stability, and grandeur of God's spiritual government.
