Article August 19, 1922 Issue

Some days ago there appeared in your columns a short...

W. Clyde Price, Committee on Publication for the State of Utah,

Salt Lake City Deseret News

Some days ago there appeared in your columns a short comment which has proved somewhat misleading. Christian Scientists understand God to be Person, but not in an anthropomorphic sense; therefore to aggrandize material personality would not be in keeping with the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Of her personality Mrs. Eddy writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 308): "Whosoever looks to me personally for his health or holiness, mistakes. He that by reason of human love or hatred or any other cause clings to my material personality, greatly errs, stops his own progress, and loses the path to health, happiness, and heaven." No greater misfortunes have overtaken the world than those brought about through the so-called "striking personality." It leads to hero worship and domination over other men and women. Personality vaunteth itself, is puffed up, behaveth itself unseemly, seeketh always its own, is easily provoked, thinketh evil. Sir William Hamilton has spoken of it as "the sign of a feeble mind." Personality is wholly material and temporal. Individuality is spiritual and eternal. The manifestation of God's qualities in men and women constitutes their individuality. Mrs. Eddy in her teachings differentiated between person and Principle. Regarding personality in religion she said, "There was never a religion or philosophy lost to the centuries except by sinking its divine Principle in personality" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 117). To justify Mrs. Eddy in her teachings one needs but turn to the story in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew, where one came to Jesus and said: "Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" And Jesus said to him: "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." Thus did Jesus, the Way-shower, turn from human personality to Principle.

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