Editorial January 8, 1927 Issue

Good Impersonal

Albert F. Gilmore

Mortals become accustomed to attach good to persons, thus making human personality the source of goodness. Notwithstanding Jesus' concise statement to the contrary, this custom is almost universal. The Master's query and positive assertion regarding the only source of good, it seems, have been quite generally overlooked by mankind, or at least disregarded. To the one who came inquiring of him, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" Jesus replied, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God;" and he followed with precise instructions as to the means of gaining eternal life, that is, by keeping the commandments.

Much more than a superficial message lies hidden in these sayings. Jesus utterly refused to accept the personal tribute contained in the salutation, "Good Master." So keen was he upon correcting the implication that good was personal to him that, even before he answered the inquirer's question, he corrected this thought. In doing this, as was his invariable custom, he pointed to God as the source of all good, the fountainhead from which spring all power, all reality, all truth. In this recognition of the divine source of all good, Christ Jesus by no means detracted from the value and importance to mankind of his own words and works. Rather did he emphasize his mission as Way-shower to men in their search for God. To prove God to be the source of all good, of all reality, ever at hand and available to meet mankind's needs, was his purpose. This could scarcely have been accomplished by arrogating to himself the power and goodness which inhere in God alone. Such a course would have immensely lessened the force of his example; in fact, would have quite nullified it. Only as he looked to God as the source of all that is, could he invoke the divine law in destroying error, in so successfully rebuking Satan's every offering.

Of the need for such self-renunciation as the Master exemplified, Mrs. Eddy writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 185), "Self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man, and the acknowledgment and achievement of his spiritual identity as the child of God, is Science that opens the very flood-gates of heaven;" and there follows the assuring statement that through this mental attitude of renunciation, good on its healing and purifying mission fills every avenue of our being. Thus our Leader informs us that by the elimination of personal sense and by attaining to the spiritual understanding of true selfhood, we become the open channels for streams of love which inundate our lives with their beneficent flood. How certainly does this remove good as a human or personal quality! To be sure, we speak, and rightly so, of good men and women, but if we are speaking out of spiritual enlightenment, the thought which prompts our words holds firmly to the fact that God alone is the source of the good which we see expressed. This mental attitude is protective in its effect, for by refusing to make good personal we have no part in confirming one in a false sense of egotism, based upon belief in personality as the source and substance of goodness.

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