Article April 17, 1920 Issue

Personality

DAISYMAY CAMPBELL HUBER

The human mind runs to extremes. Gaining the first glimpse of God as Principle, it jumps to the conclusion that Christian Science denies God as Person. Then follows the experience of getting away from personality, which is of longer or shorter duration according to the time it takes the human mind to arrive at the illogic of its own conclusion and find that Christian Science denies no such thing.

On page 27 of "No and Yes," Mrs. Eddy asks, "Who can say what the absolute personality of God or man is?" On page 4 of the Message for 1900 she says, "In divine Science, divine Love includes and reflects all that really is, all personality and individuality;" and again, in the Message for 1901, under the caption, "God is the Infinite Person" (p. 5), she says, "Do Christian Scientists believe in personality? They do, but their personality is defined spiritually, not materially—by Mind, not by matter. We do not blot out the material race of Adam, but leave all sin to God's fiat—self-extinction, and to the final manifestation of the real spiritual man and universe."

This, then, is the crux of the matter. Christian Science denies the materiality, the finity, of Person and personality, but it does not deny Person or personality. For so many years God was known as person in the sense of an enlarged man that Mrs. Eddy saw the necessity of removing this limited concept before God could be clearly understood; hence her use of the term Principle as a synonym for God and her insistence upon the understanding of this term as applied to God. She did not, however, deny God as Person, and a careful study of her writings will reveal this fact. In Science and Health, the term Person as applied to God is used three times. In the other writings it is used twenty-nine times, while the term personality, which literally means Person manifest, is used many times throughout her works, sometimes in reference to the finite, material, false sense of Person, which must be put off; at others in the scientific sense, as God's manifestation, which God preserves forever.

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