Editorial May 7, 1921 Issue

Personal Magnetism

Gustavus S. Paine

PERSONAL magnetism has often been considered so desirable that schools and courses, established for its development and exploitation, have used various mesmeric forms of advertising to persuade people that what they offer is necessary for success. Speakers, writers, social leaders, politicians, physicians, lawyers, ministers, actors, and, in fact, all those especially who appear before or deal with the public directly are often told that they need to cultivate personality. In the armies and navies during the war and afterwards, and likewise in industries, psychological tests have been used for the measuring of personal qualities, supposed to be inherent in matter and to vary in different material bodies. Thus there seem to be multitudinous phases of the belief that man is a mere animal, living in a material body and constituted of material actions and reactions, some of them more animated and effective than others.

The belief that a material body is alive, and that its vitality and energy may vary, is, of course, a belief of limitation. The true living which expresses infinite Life must be unlimited, indestructible, and indivisible. Human personality, with its supposed limitations and subdivisions, only counterfeits the undivided wholeness of activity which is the real man manifesting the one divine Mind. Freedom from limitations comes not through a development of human characteristics, calculated to attract human attention, but through the understanding of Principle, divine Mind, as infinitely and harmoniously manifest. Perfect, divine Mind is God, the creator and preserver of spiritual wholeness throughout true living. As we read on pages 336 and 337 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, "God is individual and personal in a scientific sense, but not in any anthropomorphic sense. Therefore man, reflecting God, cannot lose his individuality; but as material sensation, or a soul in the body, blind mortals do lose sight of spiritual individuality. Material personality is not realism; it is not the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God."

To-day, as always, it is important to understand what Christ Jesus said to the young man who inquired how he might have eternal life: "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God." In the practice of Christian Science, so-called personal magnetism can accomplish nothing, since reliance on infinite intelligence as the source of wholeness and continuity in true living alone is beneficial. What are called, in Christian Science, practitioner and patient or teacher and student, for instance, are simply states of human thought turning together to Principle for healing and guidance. When one praises or blames personality for any seeming, and looks upon mere physicality as attractive or unattractive, he is, to that extent, ignorant of spiritual reality, and needs to be reminded vigorously of the truth that only divine intelligence has ever produced good and that there is really nothing else to produce anything, good or bad.

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