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What is Perfect Love

“Perfect love is gentle and teachable, kind, and easy to be entreated. It enters the school of Christ, as a pupil, not as a master, realizing how much is yet to be learned, rather than how much has been attained. Perfect love shows us our ignorance and begets the inextinguishable desire to dissipate that darkness, and to enter the realm of real and reliable knowledge. If you find yourself growing wise above all your teachers, inclined to become dogmatic, to criticise your fellow disciples and set yourself up as a standard for the whole church, you have no little reason to fear that you are not controlled by the Spirit of God. Self-wisdom may easily assume the place of divine wisdom; and Satan may appear as an angel of light even in one who concerns himself with the most holy things. In no way are his ends more effectually secured than by inducing people to promote the subject of holiness by exceptional methods, and in an unteachable and arrogant spirit.”

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— February, 1880 —