THE PRIMACY OP LOVE

ït is one of Carpenter's fundamental tenets — perhaps the one — that ail forms of Love, from lowest to highest, are forms of the cosmic consciousness. While many interpret the immortal phrase — the final Word (if any such were ever uttered) both of reUgion and of life — " God is Love," as if it meant " God loves," and not seldom Umit its benison to certain persons, or imagine that it can be superseded by other and contrary émotions in the divine heart, C arpenter accq)ts the words literally as if they formed an équation or an identity. For him, the expérience of love is the expérience of God. Love is the imiversal realized in the particular. Love is the real présence. Love is ail. And, in its human référence, love is not so much one passion among others, it is the immortal aspect of a man ; when a man loves, and only then, he is living his life on the universal and eternal plane. The love-life is eternal life. He who loves, knows God in that expérience. Love is God coming to consciousness in man. In Love, man becomes God.

It is scarcely necessary to insert the warning hère that C arpenter does not use the term " God " in the Hebraistic or even in the traditional Christian sensé, but as a synonym of the Universal Being, i the Spiritual Whole. His idea is nearer to that expressed in Pope' s famous couplet,

1 Ail a^e but parts of one stupendous whole,

I Whose body Nature is, and God the soûl ;

if it is understood that the Soûl i§ not something