sist in identification with God and, since man's essence is his understanding, the consciousness of that truth.
Will the reader see how the doctrine of human blessedness which we have been tracing is in logical harmony with the doctrines of the nature of man, of error and evil, of the trinity and many others that we have considered?
It follows logically from such an explanation of human blessedness that it is found in the fading out of personality. We have seen that Mrs. Eddy's god is not a person but a principle. Since man should become like her god then he should lose his individuality and personality. Mrs. Eddy fights against this inference as did the Neoplatonists[1] but her weapons of defense are weak. She can do nothing but baldly to deny it.[2] She cannot disprove it. In the first edition of Science and Health, in which she was not so shrewd in hiding this deadly defect of non-personality, both with reference to God and to man, as she was in the late editions of the work, though it is not at all eliminated from these, she says: “Personality will be swallowed up in the boundless Love that shadows forth man; and beauty, immortality, and blessedness, be the glorious proof of existence you recognize. This is not losing man nor robbing God but finding yourself more blessed, as Principle than person, as God than man.”[3]
- ↑ Cf. Plotinus, 4. 3. 5. and Spinoza in Eth. 5. 22. and 5. 23.
- ↑ Cf. S. and H. p. 259.
- ↑ p. 227.
