Personal Contagion

MARY BAKER G. EDDY.

This article was later republished in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany: My. 116:1-118:7

THE following letter is so right and requisite that I hereby endorse it for the benefit of the reader.

At a time of contagious disease, Christian Scientists endeavor to rise in consciousness to the true sense of the omnipotence of Life, Truth, and Love, and this great fact in Christian Science realized will stop a contagion.

In time of religious or scientific prosperity, certain individuals are inclined to cling to the personality of its Leader. This state of mind is sickly; it is a contagion—a mental malady, which must be met and overcome. Why? Because it would dethrone the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have one God."

If God is one and God is Person, then Person is infinite; and there is no personal worship, for God is divine Principle, Love. Hence the sin, the danger and darkness of personal contagion.

Forgetting divine Principle brings on this contagion. Its symptoms are based upon personal sight or sense. Declaring the truth regarding an individual or Leader, rendering praise to whom praise is due, is not a symptom of this contagious malady, but persistent pursuit of his or her person is.

Every loss in grace and growth spiritual, since time began, has come from injustice and personal contagion. Had the ages helped their leaders to, and let them alone in God's glory, the world would not have lost the Science of Christianity.

"What went ye out for to see?" A person, or a Principle? Whichever it be, determines the right or the wrong of this following. A personal motive gratified by sense will leave one "a reed shaken with the wind," whereas helping a Leader in God's direction, and giving this Leader time and retirement to pursue the infinite ascent—the comprehending of the Divine order and consciousness in Science—will break one's own dream of personal sense, heal disease, and make one a Christian Scientist.

Is not the old question still rampant? "When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?" But when may we see you, to get some good out of your personality?

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (St. John). This great truth of God's impersonality and individuality and of man in His image and likeness, individual, but not personal, is the foundation of Christian Science. There was never a religion or philosophy lost to the centuries except by sinking its divine Principle in personality. May all Christian Scientists ponder this fact, and give their talents and loving hearts free scope only in the right direction!

I left Boston in the height of prosperity to retreat from the world, and to seek the one divine Person, whereby and wherein to show others the footsteps from sense to Soul. To give me this opportunity is all that I ask of mankind.

My soul thanks the loyal, royal natures of the beloved members of my Church who cheerfully obey God and steadily go on promoting the true Principle of Christian Science. Only the disobedient spread personal contagion, and any imaginary benefit they receive is the effect of self-mesmerism wherein the remedy is worse than the disease.

Pleasant View, Concord, N. H., June 30, 1906.

The letter to which Mrs. Eddy refers in the first paragraph of the foregoing article reads as follows:—

Boston, Mass, June 26, 1906.

Dear Leader:—Being about to leave the States for South America, to make my home in Ecuador for an indefinite season, I took the liberty of visiting Concord and driving out to your home, some days since.

I just wish to say that the lesson learned during that visit will not soon be forgotten, and I came away with a sense of having intruded upon your much-desired, yea needed, seclusion.

The significance of your words, "time to assimilate myself to God," came to me with renewed force, and saw how, under the guise of loving interest, we might become tedious hindrances to the fulfilment of not only your highest hope, but our own as well. Therefore my next visit to Concord can only be upon special invitation from an authorized source.

From the "genial tropics" my love will go out to you, as it ever has here. In joyous anticipation of future good news to tell you, I am

Earnestly yours,
(Mrs.) Nina M. Henderson,
Guayaquil, Ecuador, S. A.

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