“How delightful it was to discover that I had power within myself to create conditions! Thoughts of love enveloped me in light, a light that had in it all beauty and all harmony. The character of my love for you changed. Desire for possession went out of it, and the wish to benefit and help you in every way, without regard to myself, took its place. I then learned that the more unselfish and universal our love, the deeper and fuller and sweeter our own being becomes. Love is the supreme power. Love is life. Love is light. Love is all there is, for love is God.
“This is a scientific truth and not merely a figure and phrase of religious philosophy.
“God is spirit and spirit is substance, the only substance in the universe. Men of science tell you that light is a mode of motion, and they speak truly, for it is the physical expression of pure spirit which is pure love. Spirit, which includes all worlds and all being is in perpetual motion; all that you see is but its different forms of manifestation.
“Your sun is not your source of light; it is but a reflector or transmitter of the one supreme light to the worlds of its system.
“The more we love the more of God do we become and express. Oh! if I could but tell you the joy that love brings. It can overcome all things. Where it dwells no evil can come; and it enters wherever the door is left open to receive it. It is everywhere, but, if your consciousness is unaware of it, for you it has no existence. Only recognize it and it is yours.
“I passed my life in combat. I attacked evil, fought it ruthlessly, and believed I was doing good. Yet I was only making evil important. You would laugh at the teacher who fought children in order to make them wise, wouldn’t you? Evil is only ignorance—otherwise spiritual darkness, and men and women are but children in knowledge. There is but one way to eradicate evil or ignorance, and that is to make more light. Open the understanding and let in the light. The darkness will flee before it. You remember Victor Hugo said: ‘Pay schoolmasters and not soldiers.’ I see now that the only way to make men better is to awaken the God or good in them; to put higher ideals before them, and not find fault with them because they don’t know all there is to know.
“Until I met you I lived a loveless life, therefore a pessimistic one. My sympathy with humankind had a narrow limit. A wrong aroused my wrath against the perpetrator of it, when it should have awakened my pity for the dark condition of his mind.
“I was conceited, intolerant, impatient, belligerent and often cruel. I went about with a lash in my hand, ready to administer upon all who did not live up to my standard. Now I see the simpler way of which we were long since told. It is to love our wayward brothers. When men learn that an injury done another injures themselves far more than the other, they will cease to be unkind.
“As a matter of course I could not give up my old ways of thinking at once. I still found myself quick to anger and ready to hate at the knowledge of offence or injury. These feelings instantly plunged me into darkness and the companionship of demons hideous to behold.
“It is so in your world also. Rage and hate darken your mind, and bring into it hideous demons of thought; but love fills you with light and beauty. Though your conception of love be crude and narrow, still the germ of divinity is in it, and it will brighten your way as far as its light extends. If you are faithful to truth as you see it, broader conceptions will come to you.