The question of the lawyer who came to Jesus (Luke 10:29), "Who is my neighbour?" is fundamental. This question cannot be answered from the basis of physical sense. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes 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; but this idea can never be seen, felt, nor understood through the physical senses."
The divine idea of Love can neither be understood nor practiced from a physical concept of oneself or of one's neighbor. It is not felt physically, for love is not a physical emotion or self-gratification. Spiritual love is so much greater than anything the physical senses can comprehend that it can only be felt, understood, and practiced from the basis of divine Love.
The divine idea of Love is the Christ. It demonstrates the universality of Love. The Christ is the ever-present, ever-active manifestation of the Love which loves because it is Love. This Christ-idea of loving one's neighbor as oneself is illustrated in human experience in compassion, unselfishness, kindness, patience, and so forth. It purifies the affections. It regenerates and heals.
Humanity's supreme need is to understand the Christ and demonstrate divine Love. Before we can love our neighbor or even know who or what our neighbor is, we must feel and understand what divine Love is. To theorize about love, to talk or write objectively about it, is in the words of Paul "as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." He says (I Cor. 13:1), "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [love], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal," and then in that unsurpassed treatise on love, the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians, he describes and defines real love.
Mrs. Eddy has this to say about love (Science and Health, p. 33): "When the human element in him struggled with the divine, our great Teacher said: 'Not my will, but Thine, be done!'—that is, Let not the flesh, but the Spirit, be represented in me. This is the new understanding of spiritual Love." To love, then, is to refute all material sense testimony with immortal evidence, to silence human will, to stand unmesmerized by the delusions of sense, untouched by its clamor.
"Let not the flesh, but the Spirit, be represented in me." In reality, who or what is the "me"? It is not a sinful, fearful mortal. A primal demand of divine Science is true self-identification. Christian Science reveals that all that actually exists is God and His idea, and that there is but one Ego. Hence the idea is not a separate ego proclaiming its own private existence but the expression of the one Ego, without which the Ego would not exist. Were it otherwise there would be hosts of egos—many souls, many gods, yet God is indivisible. To demonstrate this fact as Science demands means to surrender the false human sense of the little finite "I" with its beliefs of birth and death, of age and time, and to acknowledge all being as the evidence of the inexhaustible I AM, the infinite individuality, which forever declares its own unbroken continuity.
When Jesus referred to himself as the Son, he identified himself as the Christ and revealed the nature of man's true selfhood. He indicated not a personal relationship of Father and Son but the spiritual oneness of Mind and idea. Mind or cause is entity, the Ego or "I"; idea is identity, reflection, expression. Idea is not the Ego, but the reflection of the Ego. Idea has no existence whatsoever apart from the Mind which originates and sustains it. It can never be severed from its source or exist outside of Mind.
This spiritual sonship is the reality of being in divine Science. And this order of Science can never be reversed. It breaks all hereditary belief, for man is seen not as the offspring of human parentage, the result of human will, but as God's idea, without beginning or end, without age or finiteness, free from the bondage of mortality, possessing nothing of himself, but reflecting spiritually all that the Father, Mind, includes.
Such right identification leaves no self to sin and suffer, no self to feel hate, and no erring neighbor to be hated. In divine Science God and His idea are one and inseparable as cause and effect. The oneness of Principle and its idea is the only basis from which the divine law of loving "one's neighbor as one's self" can be comprehended.
True self-identification, as Science reveals it, precludes the possibility of loss or separation, of idolatrous worship miscalled love, of personal domination, or of one idea being dependent upon another idea for completeness, activity, peace, or satisfaction. Because Mind is infinite, it embraces the whole teeming universe of Mind within itself, and because Mind is one there is no possibility of friction, loss, or incompleteness. The one Ego, or infinite individuality, constitutes the individuality and identity of all that it includes. From this basis only can it be understood that all conscious being is infinite.
Thus the brotherhood of man exemplifies not many minds living together in harmony, but one Mind expressing its own infinitude or infinite individuality. In this Mind is no ignorance, no darkness, nothing unknown, nothing unlike God or foreign to the nature of Love. And my neighbor, as myself, is seen as the idea of God, which Mind includes within itself.
So my neighbor is not anyone unpleasant, of a race or creed or nationality which I do not comprehend and cannot get along with. My neighbor is never actuated by selfishness toward me, nor I toward him, for the Ego, reflecting itself in multifarious forms, remains forever one. Mrs. Eddy says (Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 5): "Applied to Deity, Father and Mother are synonymous terms; they signify one God. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost mean God, man, and divine Science. God is self-existent, the essence and source of the two latter, and their office is that of eternal, infinite individuality. I see no other way under heaven and among men whereby to have one God, and man in His image and likeness, loving another as himself."
As this point is understood we shall express in increasing degree the limitless capacity of being. We shall not lose our identity but find it, and with it our eternal, infinite individuality, our everlasting Life. Apart from this scientific explanation of God and man there is no basis for universal peace and the brotherhood of man, and Jesus' command to "love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 22:39) is unfulfilled. Only the spiritualization of our sense of God can reveal man as he truly is, the image of Love, unfallen, upright, and forever blessed. The mortal seeming is not man's true selfhood. Until we let go of the mortal concept and acknowledge the one Ego we cannot behold our neighbor, nor see our own true selfhood in Science.
It is well to remind ourself often in the course of the day—to stop whatever we are doing for a moment and realize that things are not what they seem to be—that we are not the little finite person running hither and yon, meeting other persons and sometimes clashing with them, pressed by many demands, and wearied and exhausted beyond measure. The one Ego, which knows only its own all-presence, all-knowledge, all-power (see Unity of Good 27:14), is limitless and deathless. It can never be weary, frightened, hopeless, is never in poverty or pain, nor can it ever be expressed in that way. Divine Mind is incapable of entertaining or expressing an illusion of finiteness. Thus error falls into oblivion for lack of witness. This truth is the spiritual love that heals. There is nothing selfish or sentimental about it. This love is the action of divine Love, the ever-present Christ. It demonstrates God's all-presence and man in His likeness, upright, whole, and free, forever loved and lovable.
Paul summarizes the matter thus (Rom. 13:9,10): "For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And then he gives the reason: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."
How far removed is this spiritual concept of loving our neighbor from the human egotistic sense that says, "My neighbor is a very unpleasant, disagreeable person, dishonest, ignorant, and so forth, but I've got to see him as God's idea and love him!" We shall never love him from that basis, because we are not seeing our neighbor. Rebuking the errors—the dishonesty, hypocrisy, bigotry, envy, selfishness, prejudice, pride which appear in mortals, Jesus said (John 8:44): "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him." Jesus denounced the testimony of the material senses. Entirely separate from the dream which calls itself a mortal, Jesus beheld man in Science as God's likeness. Thus he proved, through the healing and regeneration of all who were touched by his power, that the Ego had never been identified with a false concept. To truly love our neighbor the imperfect human sense or misconception must yield and disappear before the spiritual sense of God and man.
This true identification of our neighbor applies not alone to our personal problems but to world affairs. How true it is that the troubled situation of the world today, its tyranny, intolerance, and war, arises from lack of understanding God aright. In our appraisal of world affairs, just as in the working out of our personal problems, the starting point must always be the allness of God, the oneness of Principle and its idea. If we start with the material sense testimony of many races, nationalities, creeds, and colors, and try to amalgamate these, we are defeated from the outset, for a conclusion is only as right as its premise. The belief in creeds, races, nationalities, and the conflicts that ensue are as much aggressive mental suggestion as the belief that we are sick and poor. The suggestion of world misunderstanding, hatred, strife, and war must be met and mastered from the standpoint of divine Science.
What a new light Christian Science throws on the brotherhood of man! Not from the basis of many divergent minds uniting as one but only from the basis of the one Ego infinitely expressing itself, can the great symphony of the universe be apprehended and its rhythmic harmony felt. In the divine oneness there is no conflict, no misunderstanding, no clashing of ideologies, no mistrust, no ignorance. The law which constitutes God's government and governs His universe is divine Science; and although the world has not yet awakened to it, the reaching out for a union of the nations is fundamentally a reaching out for God's law. In Science, nations, as individuals, coincide with God's government, for the universal kingdom is God's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven within us, where divine Love reigns supreme.
Thus we see that to think of our neighbor as a person, even a person whom we love so much that we would sacrifice everything for him is not love but the opposite of love, for it identifies him as a mortal and pins upon him, as well as upon ourself, the belief of mortality. There is only one way to fulfill the command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," namely, to acknowledge divine Mind as the only Ego and demonstrate the oneness of God and His idea as Christian Science reveals it.
