Editorial February 6, 1926 Issue

Man's True Selfhood

Albert F. Gilmore

Until thought is leavened with spiritual truth, the tendency of mortals to exaggerate or minimize personality is almost universal. The inflated sense of importance which persons so often attach to themselves is sometimes followed by the other extreme, an equally false sense of humility, which would minify, depreciate, and delate, until one's capabilities and accomplishments become dessicated and shrunken. The one attitude is as unscientific as the other; both are false.

Exalted personality is always based upon a false sense of selfhood, the belief that a mortal, self-made, self-governed, and self-sufficient, is man. The familiar saying regarding a person that "he is self-made, and proud of his maker," grows out of this misconception of man. On the other hand, self-depreciation, which constantly accuses and condemns one's self, is no more to be commended. This attitude likewise springs from an erroneous concept of man, false and altogether mistaken.

Paul, aware of the instability of mortals in his day, in the epistle to the Romans tells us of the modes of thought which accuse or excuse one another. Mortals having no more sound basis of judgment now than then are still prone to fall into this error; for so-called mortal mind loves to praise and to blame, to exalt and to depreciate, always, be it said, from a wrong motive. How can unstable mortal belief formulate a sound opinion regarding anything! Its premises, arguments, and conclusions comprise no permanent truth.

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