Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/59

Rh sentences, but I note only four, namely, that Mrs. Eddy refers to spirit or God as “it”; that she understands that personality implies individuality; that God's individuality, as his personality, is in no sense like man's individuality, and that she claims that her teaching concerning the individuality of God is a “revelation of divine Science.” God is not, she affirms, an individual “in any anthropomorphic sense.”

No one would claim that God is an individual in every human respect, that is, both physically and spiritually. But the individuality of God, like his personality, if conceived at all, must be conceived as in some sense anthropomorphic. The following quotation from Mrs. Eddy shows this, of which not only the thought but the language should be considered with special care. “The term individuality is also open to objections, because an individual may be one of a series, one of many, as an individual man, an individual horse; whereas God is One, — not one of a series, but one alone and without an equal.” Mrs. Eddy has been very sly in covering up her tracks but she made a fatal blunder when she wrote that sentence down. It alone, when its full force is felt, is enough to stamp Mrs. Eddy's doctrine of God as Neoplatonic. Plotinus says: “It is not proper that it (the One) should be a certain one of those things to which it is prior;” “It is not some one of all things but is prior to all things;” “The One