"Many waters" FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR          Upon first thought, few people would be likely to say, if asked, that love is the one enduring fact. Indeed, the senses testify upon every hand that love is the thing most buffeted in actual experience, most betrayed and disappointed; and yet it would be difficult to imagine any human being so submerged in cynicism or degradation as to be forever impervious to a genuine expression of love. Jesus' experience with the demoniac removes any doubt about that. This victim of evil belief, so extreme that it represented almost the sum of divine Love's opposite, and which cried out against the approach of Truth, yielded at once to the authority of divine Love, as expressed through Jesus the Christ. However men may fancy, in their devious antagonisms and bitterness, that love has perished from experience, the longing for love remains; and this is doubtless what the wise man realized when he declared, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."          Divine Love is the enduring fact; and the only reason that men have not more often been satisfied with its baptismal healing power is because they have sought and have given one another only a human sense of love, the best they know, perhaps, but none the less a transitory quality that loses its value, if too severely tried, and turns to hate. The reason that mankind perpetually long for Love is not because of any permanent satisfaction to be found in human love when it is won, for that is temporal, if not inconstant, but because divine Love, or Principle, is the central fact of being, and the human heart, consciously or unconsciously, yearns for the spiritual source. This human longing was answered once and for all in the advent and the works of Jesus the Christ. Love, as divine Principle, was the supreme truth which he revealed; it was the basis of his words and miracles; his pure understanding of it was the only secret contained in his mighty triumphs, and this secret he unfolded for all to possess and use. Of the purpose of his work, Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 19), "Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus' teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death, by the law of Spirit, — the law of divine Love."          The human mind does not take kindly to the idea of loving according to law. It wishes to love as it pleases; and it is because it insists upon loving as it is moved by impulse and caprice, that its sense of love must always run dry and its gardens of delight turn to wastes and desolation. This false sense of love is a fundamental error underlying all human discord, an error which Jesus' revelation of God as divine Principle was designed to correct. He declared that God is Father, and in this statement inheres the correlated fact that man is son, even if he had not explicitly so explained man's relation to God. But this truth he disclosed in all his teaching and deeds, revealing spiritual man as the idea of Love, his nature as therefore loving, and his being perfect; and this right understanding of God's man stilled the storms of human passions and, consequently, quenched their penalties.          Marveling at this revelation of the unconquerable love of God and man in the likeness of God, John afterwards wrote, "Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God." Spiritual man loves, then, and this not in the least because he is induced by human attraction, but because it is the law of his being to love. He loves because God is Love, exactly as he lives because God is Life. Spiritual love is therefore incapable of reversal or grief, since it exists by reason of, and expresses itself according to, unchanging law, or the Science of divine Love. Of this consciousness of pure being and of its power to destroy the material sense of discord, Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 274 of Science and Health: "The senses of Spirit abide in Love, and they demonstrate Truth and Life. Hence Christianity and the Science which expounds it are based on spiritual understanding, and they supersede the so-called laws of matter."          Acknowledgment of the presence of divine Love does not dispute the fact that, to human sense, those who live lovingly may encounter affliction, as do those who hate. The Bible bears, indeed, a record of the sufferings of loving women and men — Joseph betrayed by his brothers; Mary fleeing with her babe into Egypt, Stephen stoned; and Paul, saying, in triumphant faith, "Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The difference between the afflictions of the righteous and of the wicked is the manner in which they are faced and the impress which the encounter leaves upon character.          Afflictions, rightly understood, serve only to turn desire more and more away from the human to the divine, and when that is accomplished and the understanding of divine Love has healed the hurt, the affliction itself no longer exists even in appearance or memory. Evil will not voluntarily cease its efforts to destroy the divine idea before it is itself destroyed. Indeed, the more loyally divine Principle is adhered to, the fiercer may be the attacks of evil upon its destroyer until its nothingness appears. But the one who abides in the understanding that God bestows nothing but harmony upon man realizes, even in the midst of the tumult, that, as Mrs. Eddy declares in her beautiful paraphrase of the twenty-third psalm (Science and Health, p. 578), "[LOVE] maketh me to lie down in green pastures: [LOVE] leadeth me beside the still waters."   "'Many waters'" The Christian Science Monitor, August 15, 1919 Christian Science Sentinel, November 1, 1919

 

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