"On these two commandments

hang all the law and the prophets."

In the First Epistle of John, fourth chapter, sixteenth verse, we are told: "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." God is also the truth. Love of truth is also love of God.

The devil is described as follows in the eighth chapter of the Gospel according to John, verse 44: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of lies."

The conflic tbetween God and the Devil is love versus hate, truth versus falsehood. In Christ's law of love we possess the touchstone by means for which we may test the validity of all other law, of all custom, of all individual behavior, including our own. In the moral and ethical sphere Christ's law of love must be the supreme authority, as the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of our land. We have the right to examine the Mosaic law of the Old Testament in the light of Christ's supreme law. What we find there that is vindictive, tyrannical and murderous is not of God-because God is love. We have the right to examine the record of Christendom itself in the light of Christ's law of love. We have the right to reject in the name of God and in Christ's name all the persecutions, brutalities and murders perpetrated in those very names by Christianity. Nothing could be more diabolical than to lie and murder in the name of God and in the name of Christ. Any man who loves is on the side of God. Every man devoted to the search for truth is on the side of God.

But what is love? God is love. Therefore, love is the presence of

God in man. God is a mystery; who can fathom God? therefore, love is a mystery. Christ's law of love requires us to live out a mystery. Because God is love, love is sacred. There is no higher end than loving and being loved. Love is not a means to some other end. In itself it is the supreme purpose.

According to the Biblical account, God had no utilitarian purpose in creating the two sexes and sexual love. In the second chapter of Genesis we read: "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." First, and foremost, Sex came into being because God recognized Adam's loneliness. Sexual love is in itself justified because it assuages loneliness.

After Eve had been created from Adam's rib, Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

Both homosexual and heterosexual seeks in the one he loves his own completion. Adam saw in Eve

alienated part of himself. To Adam, Eve was flesh of his flesh and of his flesh and by means of sexual love he sought to be reunited with his lost self, so that he and she might be one flesh. in sexual love the homosexal also seeks his own completion. He, too, needs and seeks cnother, an opposite, or at least a complementary being, to round him out. We have heard much, too much, about the narcissism" of the homosexual. Let us not overlook the narcissism in Adam's words! After all, it was to heterosexual love that La Rochefoucauld was referring when he wrote that love is "egoisme a

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deux". Let us, without the Frenchman's cynicism, accept the fact that sexual love is an extension of one's self-love. Let us remember that God created sexual love for the sake of man's happiness.

Christ did not forbid us to love ourselves. He tells us to love our neighbor as if he were a second self.

It is true that in the first chapter of Genesis God commanded the first man and the first woman to "increase and multiply". But God was not interested in man's utility. His aim was not that of the modern state. It was not his purpose to people the earth with tillers of the soil, with laborers, with artisans, with mariners, with soldiers. It was simply good that man should not be alone that from the union of man and woman there should issue other men and women with a bit of the divine breath in them, capable of loving and being loved. When God issued that first first command there were only two human beings in the world. Since God is love, are we to suppose that he issues the same command, inexorably, to India today? In a world where overpopulation becomes a major cause of hellish wars does Love invariably demand, as in his Eden, "Increase and multiply"?

From the first God showed concern for the well-being of human individuals. In Christianity the human individual is the priceless thing. Overpopulaton, as in Asia and in many parts of Europe, causes a devaluation of human life, a degradation of human individuals. Human beings with the breath of God in them come to be worth less in the market places than objects made of wood and iron and steel. Is it love to bring children into world when they are doomed to starvation and peonage? Is it love to bring to birth more sons and daughters than the

very land can nourish?

People have expressed alarm because of the apparent increase of homosexuality in the Western World. They forget that the birth rate, at least in the United States, has also increased by leaps and bounds. It seems to me that homosexuality, as an alternative form of love, an alternative means of assuaging human loneliness, is a sort of sexual and social safety valve rather than a menace. It seems to me that at least a considerable part of the value of homosexuality both to individuals and to society lies. precisely in the fact that it relieves pressures which might otherwise become dangerous.

Love is a mystery. Yet it is a mystery about which many things may be known. We are taught that marriage is a sacrament. The Methodist minister, Albert E. Day, has written (in his book, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PRAYER) as follows about the role of sexual love in the spritual life: "There is often failure among the advocates of celibacy to comprehend what a marriage of love can mean. There is a disregard of the fact that the union of bodies in such a marriage can be a true sacrament of the spirit in which husband and wife, completely giving themselves to each other, at the same time reach a new dedication of themselves and their love to God. There is also a complete lack of understanding of that gratitude which a husband and wife may know as their loneliness is ended in the perfect human comradeship of body, mind, and spirit; a gratitude which is so deep and profound as to be come an opening in consciousness outward to the giver of such a gift." It seems to me, in all sincerity, that the same words might be applied to the physical union of friends.

Can we discover in Christ's teachings any guide to the understanding