Article August 31, 1912 Issue

FROM PERSONALITY TO PRINCIPLE

LUCY HAYS EASTMAN.

Amid the silence of a starless night fear would voice the ignorance of darkness, and tremblingly seek to hide its godless self among the shaken reeds of personal sense, or else cry out to an unknown God for rescue from its own intimidating delusions. Anon, and as the mist begins to clear, a star is seen that glimmers ever brighter between the moving clouds. "At last!" exclaims the fearful heart, "I see the light," and loosening a little its rigid grasp upon personal self, it peers upward, to fasten its gaze with hungry intensity upon the dawning light of revealed Truth. Thus the darkness of fear and doubt gives way before the dawn in Christian Science of the Principle that lends its light to every aspiring heart. Too long have men looked for a personal savior; too heavily have they leaned upon the bruised reed, too often have they sought to quench their thirst from an empty cup! Moses, David, and all the God-knowing prophets shone as stars with spiritual brightness upon the gloom of material sense, giving forth gleams of that dawn whereafter there shall be no more night. Brighter still burned the Bethlehem star as it reflected the beauty of that light which dispels the somber shadows of the last enemy. Confidently we know that, even as the stellar universe glimmers unchanged behind the clouds, so do these stars of reflected goodness continue to dissipate the idolatry of worldliness with the worship of Spirit and of Truth.

Giving thanks for every character of worth, made great through goodness, we need but lift our eyes to behold the "quickening spirit" which was the source of all their strength, and which waits to heal the blind, and deaf, and the halt today. It is ours to know blessedly for ourselves this omnipotent and ever-present good, for He hovers tenderly around us all. Clinging disobediently to the man of clay, we still starve for Love. He who is looking for one "clothed in soft raiment" is still a dweller in the unyielding wilderness of personality. Though such a one may behold the greatest among men, he still has not seen the least in the kingdom of heaven. Because personality is blinded by material sense, it can never know the "only begotten Son" who dwells in the bosom of the Father.

Today the voice in the wilderness is again crying, "Make straight the way of the Lord,"—make ready for the Christ-idea which, coming after the highest human concept of good, is preferred before personality; and it is ours to reach out for the grace which sunders the chain of personal dependence, absorption, obsession, adoration, and which leads us to behold the Lamb of God outside of all material selfhood! The darkness of personal contagion must vanish before the light of divine Principle, and the truth of these words of our Leader will then be understood and demonstrated: "If God is one and God is Person, then Person is infinite; and there is no personal worship, for God is divine Principle, Love" (Pamphlet, Personal Contagion, p. 3).

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