Affection for good, for Truth, and for Love opens wide the gateway of thought through which the understanding of Christian Science can be received. Quiet inner ardor for the things of Spirit offers a permanent abiding place within our hearts for the truth of God and man. It is through this affection that we become aware of the spirit of Christian Science which, along with its letter, inspires us to demonstrate its truth. Affection for God reveals to us the nobility, purity, intelligence, loveliness, and perfection of God's expression, man. One's affection for God's creation, man and the universe, enables one to apprehend its beauty, permanence, and spiritual nature. Without affection there is no buoyancy to being, no joy in companionship, no appreciation of home, no spur to accomplishment.
In her book "Retrospection and Introspection" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 81): "The letter of the law of God, separated from its spirit, tends to demoralize mortals, and must be corrected by a diviner sense of liberty and light. The spirit of Truth extinguishes false thinking, feeling, and acting, and falsity must thus decay, ere spiritual sense, affectional consciousness, and genuine goodness become so apparent as to be well understood." In this last statement Mrs. Eddy plainly associates spiritual sense with affectional consciousness and indicates that the letter separated from the spirit of Truth demoralizes mortals. The letter alone may become intellectual bigotry, self-righteousness, or moral license, whereas affectional consciousness beholds man in his original purity, integrity, and love, as the likeness of God.
It is love, the affectional consciousness or spiritual sense, from which springs the desire to be honest, upright, just, and good, to do unto others as we would they should do unto us, in other words, to be Godlike. The letter of Christian Science without its spirit leads away from the contemplation of divine ideas to a personal sense of philosophizing and rationalizing about the statements of truth. The letter may be correctly stated, but without the inspiration of Love and the demonstrability of Principle it might easily remain in the realm of human intellectualism, which is but a personal sense of intelligence, a belief that intellectuality proceeds from a person and is his personal possession.
