13. The Religion of Love

The Religion of Love is misconceived through many distortions and misrepresentations of the concept of love, for the greatest part of true love is severity! That which is now called love is anything but love. If all so-called loves are relentlessly investigated, nothing remains but selfishness, vanity, weakness, comfort, conceit or instinct.
 
True love will not look at what pleases the other person, what is pleasant and gives him pleasure, but it will only look at what is useful to the other person! Regardless of whether it gives the other person pleasure or not. That is true loving and serving.
 
So when it is written: “Love your enemies!” This means: “Do what is good for them! Even chastise them also, if they cannot come to knowledge in any other way!” This is serving them. Only justice must prevail; for love cannot be separated from justice, they are one! Undue indulgence would mean making the enemies’ faults even greater and thereby letting them slide further down the slippery slope. Would that be love? On the contrary, one would burden oneself with guilt!
 
The Religion of Love has been made into a religion of slackness, only out of the expressed desires of men, just as the person of the Bringer of Truth, Christ Jesus, has been dragged down to a softness and yieldingness which He never possessed. It was precisely through All-Love that He was austere and serious among men of intellect. His sadness, which often afflicted Him, was only natural in view of His High Mission and the human nature facing it. It had nothing to do with softness.
 
The Religion of Love, after all distortions and dogmas have been put aside, will be a doctrine of the strictest consistency, in which no weakness or illogical indulgence is to be found.