LOVE.

New Zealand Tablet, 18 August 1921, Page 45

LOVE.

To love is to wish well to. It implies a sincere interior act of will; external manifestation of it as occasion offers; and an actual bestowal of benefits, when opportunity and need arise. Such is the love we owe to parents; the love of which St. John writes in his first Epistle, when he says: “My children, let us not love in word; neither with the tongue, but in truth and in deed.” It is not a mere sentiment or feeling with which love is so often confounded, independent of our choice, for which we can frequently assign no satisfactory motive or explanation. It is an exercise of our free-will, for reasons which are apprehended as sufficient and which, in the case of parents, aro sufficient, even though the feeling or attraction, at times called love, be difficult to arouse, perhaps impossible. Parents are not always such as to excite and secure a sentiment of affection; the influence they exercise may tend to kill or deaden it but we can still love such parents, in the sense of the Commandment; we can wish them well, however unattractive they may be. We are to love our parents, then, firstly, because God loves them wishes them all manner of good things, j natural and supernatural, and calls on us to love them. We are to love them for God’s sake; the highest and purest love. We are to love them also for their own; in part requital for the many and great blessings we have received from them! Repay in full we never can; even though we should lay down life itself for them. And this love we may nevelr renounce. Whatever a parent’s faults may be, however little entitled he may become to reverence 'or obedience or respect, he can never destroy the foundation on which the child’s duty of love is based— gift of being, which he has bestowed. Hence, too, when children go out from the parents’ home, and pass from under their authority, the claim to love, the duty of loving, persist

unchanged. Hence, finally, the obligation, at all times, under all circumstances, to render fitting assistance, in a parent’s need.