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TWENTIETH DAY

LOVE MANIFESTED IN ACTION

            Ques. What is the influence on a nature, like mine – weak in love – of struggling to manifest loving action?

            Ans. To understand this, you must understand the influence of love within the Universe and on the whole nature of man. Love is nothing unless the surrendering of self for others. The mere sentiment of love, not manifested in action, is like the germ or seed which never fulfils its promise or comes to life. The love which you manifest in beneficent action lifts you to higher planes, as it lifts those to whom you manifest it also to higher planes, because love is creative in its force. It is the true manifestation of your lives, as the Universe

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is the true manifestation of God’s Being. We have told you before that love is the creative action of the Universe, the force which emanates from God to individuate itself into innumerable centers of Godhead, which you and all beings are, or shall become. So it is with your lives. Inasmuch as you love (here we do not mean as you feel love, but as you outbreathe love in action around you), you too create and throw off that which becomes life and blessedness in your fellow creatures. Thus you manifest yourselves in creative force through your love. Of such nature are the “miracles” of Christ, the true works of all Christhood. Your present conception of the power of love is so small because you have not yet realized the mighty creative and essential nature of love. It has yet to be shown that man truly is born in the image of God, in this respect as in all others, and that God’s powers are the type truly of his own powers. Your love is now manifested chiefly in sentiment, which is but the germ of love, and in so far as it is manifested in action it is in action of low creative value. Your love satisfies itself truly with ministering as you understand it to the increased welfare of your fellows; but the standard of this ministry is a poor standard even relative to its own ideal, born of ignorance. It exhausts itself mainly in doing that which when done has small value; because you have not grasped the true nature of love, nor the infinitude of the source from whence to replenish it. Your love so often grows cold and weary because you realize a limit where there is no limit, whether you look for it within your own love-begotten souls, or among the vast immensities expressing God’s love around you. Your love slackens, O men, because you do not climb long enough and high enough; because your knowledge of God is not true knowledge, but only knowledge of a man-made standard which you have christened with the holy name of God. All you know of God apart from this standard, and apart from your faculties

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of intuition, as yet undeveloped, is by means of God’s manifestation in nature. You are the culminating expression on Earth of this manifestation, yet have you not grasped the true meaning of this fact.

            When you have realized that the end of God’s love, or God’s manifestation in Nature, is the individuated Godhead of conscious Life, expressed through man and his like, up to Angels and Christs, then will you also realize that the end of all this conscious being is LOVE – is God. As God propels Himself into myriad manifestations which unfold into conscious, sentient, individual life, so must you throw your innermost force and life fearlessly around you, assured with the mighty assurance springing from the knowledge of your Divine birth, that your consciousness is none other than the infinite Love-Force which you call God, assured that it can only express itself truly as does its Holy Parent, in manifestations of constructive love and constructive life. The true test in the world of what is love, is the test of its powers of endurance and growth. True love in man, like love in God, must be creative and constructive, must take actual expression in outward form and being that is God or Good-wards. Such is the love ye see expressed throughout the universe, and such, too, must be all true expression of love in you. Ye magnify the evil, that is the darkness, of your earth, because the evolution of love or God in you is greater than it was in your forefathers, but ye magnify it also because your faith in God or good is weak. Your very need of light reacts at times in despair and faithlessness. In your pessimism, springing from this need (which shall surely be answered) you doubt that God or good was and is, and shall be manifested through men on earth. You doubt the power of your own love-begotten souls to redeem the earth from that which your increased nearness to God has shown you to be evil, and thus far you doubt God. All bitter doubt, all negation of God, which does not lead you directly to behold the

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God within you, is so much force wasted, so much life mis-spent. All pessimism is want of faith in God, all criticism which finds not its outlet in creative action is unmeaning. In this suggestion you will find the secret of the mighty powers of faith, of enthusiasm, of the endurance of hope and love in face of what seems evil. Your common-place proverb, “Nothing succeeds like success,” reads to us: – Nothing succeeds like faith in your own inmost powers of action which are God-born and originate success. For true faith is ever man’s cooperation with God, and man’s sense of God’s co-operation through him with the law underlying all Nature, all Manifestation, the law of God-wardness.