The strength and unshakability of Christian Science are in the fact that it is founded on the rock of Truth, unchanging Principle, and does not depend for its origin or continuance on any person or persons. Human persons may come and go, but God and all that is His go on forever, unaffected by the shifting scenes of earth.

The weakness of the church through the ages has been the willingness of men unduly to exalt, idolize, and even worship persons, and to be blinded to the one infinite Person, our ever-present God, by whom, for whom, and in whom we all exist. Human personality is not man's individuality. To confuse them is a grievous mistake. Reality is not mortal mind expressed by many mortal personalities. Reality is eternal Mind expressed by a universe of spiritual individualities.

Human persons are sometimes prominent, sometimes obscure, sometimes good, and sometimes bad, with wide variations of quality and condition in between. Most of us would like to be better—yes, much better—than we are. Whatever good has appeared, or is appearing, in the consciousness, work, and life of any of our fellows we should gratefully recognize, remembering always that genuine good is only of God, the one real Person, and never originates with, nor becomes the personal possession of, any human.

One of the early Christian Science lecturers wisely cautioned his audiences not to confuse Christian Science with Christian Scientists! To let our sense of Science become entangled with the upswing or downswing of human persons, their successes or their failures, is seriously to lessen our usefulness, and dwarf our growth Truthward. Says Mary Baker Eddy in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 282), "Remember, it is personality, and the sense of personality in God or in man, that limits man." You and I need, indeed, to remember just this, that to accept as real, and think or act from, the basis of personality is to bind ourselves in the stocks of material sense. If our feet are so bound, progress stops. No one can cling to the transient and finite and at the same time grow into a sense of the spiritual and infinite.

Mathematics is not subject to nor chargeable with, the limitations of the persons who study it, or measurably use it. No more does the Science of being yield aught of its immutable nature to the imperfection of the persons who are accepting its precepts, but have proved only in a measure its impeccable nature.

Christ Jesus questioned Simon Bar-jona, "But whom say ye that I am?" Simon replied, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." The disciple's realization that the Master came to present the Christ, the true idea of God and His son, man, was so vital with truth that the Master forthwith told Simon he should thenceforth be called Peter (the Greek word petros, or stone). Then declared Jesus, "Upon this rock [the spiritual idea, or Christ] I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

Do we realize the import of these words? On the rock of man's spiritual sonship with God must all true building rest. There is no other foundation. Reality is God and His idea.

Mrs. Eddy encountered the mistaken tendency of some of her followers to be worshipful of her personality, and she corrected it with the command to follow her as our Leader only so far as she follows Christ (Message for 1901, p. 34). Christian Scientists are not followers of persons, but are, with their great Leader, co-followers of Christ.

All of us have struggles with the sense of human personality. The basic error, mortal mind, persistently argues that it is identified in and by mortal personality. It says each of us has a mortal personality, and that this personality is environed in a world filled with mortal persons. It tempts us to trust too much in some, and to be indifferent to the worthiness of others. But sooner or later everyone must see the futility of believing that human persons can be relied on for enduring benefits. No person, for instance, gives you or me life, consciousness, ideas, health, identity, or continuity. No person can be the primary source of inspiration, revelation, and spiritual growth for us. Nothing that is basically essential comes to us from persons. All that is essential to our life, health, and happiness is derived from the omnipresent One in whom is "no variableness, neither shadow of turning"—the great Father-Mother Love that is God.

We help our brother and ourselves, and contribute to the accomplishment of the purposes of God, as we see that human personality with all its human history, so far as it expresses the ebb and the flow of material thought, is but error's counterfeit of true individuality, and is never our selfhood, our brother's selfhood, or any selfhood.

In the human order the wrenching of our heartstrings is sometimes violent. Disappointed hopes, shaken trusts, griefs that would rend us, if we consent to believe that human events and human persons represent reality, crowd upon us. What is the remedy? Simply to turn mentally and consistently from the transient, human, material order to the spiritual and divine; to realize that no crashing of human hopes, or confidences in others, no frustration of human plans, no frailty of human personalities, called ours or another's, has changed the intactness and eternality of God and His kingdom one iota.

Here is our rock—the unalterability of God's kingdom, with all true individualities securely environed therein. On this rock let us build, and build, and build, never looking back regretfully to the human, save to remind us of the lessons of experience it has to impart. Forward, Truthward, Godward, let us march, with everlasting joy that, as Paul told the Hebrews, the voice of Truth shaketh the earth and causeth "the removing of those things that are shaken...that those things which cannot be shaken may remain."

Paul Stark Seeley