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WHAT TRUE LOVE IS

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 30, 1876

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 48, No. 22.

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WHAT TRUE LOVE IS.

By Mrs. H. B. Stowe

Many women suppose they love their husbands, when, unfortunately, they have not the beginning of an idea what love is. Let me explain it to you. Loving to be admired by a man, loving to be petted by him, and loving to be praised by him, is not loving a man. All these may be when a woman has no power of loving at all,—they may all be simply because she loves herself, caressed, coaxed, as a cat likes to be coaxed and stroked, and fed with cream, and to have a warm corner.
But all this is not love. It may exist, to be sure, where there is love; it generally does. But it may also exist where there is no love. Love is self-sacrifice; it is life out of self and in another. Its very essence is the preferring of the comfort, the ease, the wishes of another to one's own, for the love we bear him. Love is giving, not receiving; love is not a sheet of blotting paper or a sponge, sucking in everything to itself: it is an out-springing fountain, giving from itself. Love's motto has been dropped into this world as a chance gem of great price by the loveliest, the fairest, the purest, the strongest of lovers that ever trod this mortal earth, of whom it is recorded that He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Now in love, there are ten receivers to one giver. There are ten persons in this world who like to be loved, where there is one who knows how to love. That, my dear ladies, is a greater attainment than all your French and music and dancing. You may lose the power of it under a load of early self-indulgence. By living just as you are all wanting to live,—living to be petted, to be flattered, to be admired, to be praised, to have your own way, and to do only that which is easy and agreeable,—you may lose the power of self-denial and self-sacrifice; you may lose the power of loving nobly and worthily, and become a mere sheet of blotting-paper all your life.—Mrs. H. B. Stowe.