Article August 26, 1922 Issue

Since a contributor in a recent issue of your paper charges...

Aaron E. Brandt, Committee on Publication for the State of Pennsylvania,

Phoenixville Daily Republican

Since a contributor in a recent issue of your paper charges me with being a worshiper of Mrs. Eddy, I feel justified in presenting something on the question of worshiping personality. Any one who thinks with judgment knows that a student can learn nothing of mathematics by worshiping a mathematician. Neither will any one gain an understanding of the Bible and work out his salvation through the truth contained therein by worshiping personality. Even Jesus found it necessary to divert attention from himself in order that his disciples might receive the spirit of Truth. He said, "If ye love me, keep my commandments." The world has largely ignored his commandments and substituted mere personal worship. Therefore it fails to demonstrate his teaching.

Mrs. Eddy repeatedly and severely rebuked the inclination to cling to personality, which she referred to in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 116) as a sickly state of mind and as "a mental malady, which must be met and overcome." On the same page she says, "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." Here, by the use of capital letters, she plainly distinguishes between the omnipresent, divine, infinite Person called God, and a human sense of personality. The sense of personality, as humanly conceived, gives no understanding necessary to overcome the beliefs of the carnal or mortal mind, as manifested in sin, sickness, and disease.

When praying to the Father, Jesus said, "Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." On another occasion he said to the people about him, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." I wish to say to your readers that, without an understanding of spiritual truth, the salvation of the world will never be worked out; and just in proportion as such understanding is gained will sin, sickness, disease, and death be overcome in the way Jesus taught and demonstrated. The Scripture again and again points out the necessity of overcoming. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things." "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life." "He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death." In order to overcome it is necessary to know how to do it, and it cannot be done except in the way Jesus himself did it. "The tenor of the Word," writes Mrs. Eddy, on page 427 of Science and Health, "shows that we shall obtain the victory over death in proportion as we overcome sin. The great difficulty lies in ignorance of what God is. God, Life, Truth, and Love make man undying."

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