What a joy it is to cease the self-torture of hating our seeming enemies! Mary Baker Eddy says (Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 210, 211), "Love your enemies, or you will not lose them; and if you love them, you will help to reform them."
We can love all because God, Spirit, created man in His own image. Hence man is spiritual and good. Whatever appears to be contrary to the law and nature of God, good, is not real but is an illusion, a mortal dream-sense, from which humanity must be aroused in order to become conscious of reality, of God's ever-present kingdom.
The New Testament teaches, and Christian Science reiterates, the great fact that proportionately as humanity learns the true meaning of spiritual, unselfed love, it will awaken from this Adam-dream of enmity, sin, sickness, and inharmony of every sort to the demonstrable understanding of man's present possession of health, love, and goodness as God's offspring. It is readily admitted by the spiritually enlightened that God is the Mind of the universe and that God is Love; hence, to be loving is to express the intelligence that has its origin in Mind. To love spiritually is to comprehend man individually and collectively as God makes him, as His spiritual, loving, and beautiful idea. Such love not only rejects that concept of man as an enemy which presents him as material, mortal, sinful, sensuous, devilish, but also the one which portrays him as materially or personally attractive. How well Paul in his great dissertation on charity, which is synonymous with love, defines charity in part when he says that it "thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth" (I Cor. 13:5,6). To love means to reflect through spiritualized thinking God's goodness, perfection, beauty, holiness, and joy. Thus love purifies human nature and exalts it.
