A sense of sinfulness merely awakened is a sense of others' sin. The beginning of regeneration brings out "God be merciful to ME a sinner." A glimmering of the truth of impersonality brings out the sense of personality. While one lives undisturbed in the general consciousness of personality, personality is relatively peaceable and innocent. When the vipers' nest is uncovered the inmates writhe and sting. When personality is uncovered it becomes aggressive. Its pretended attacks on personality in others are an effort at self-preservation—an evasion, a trick, contrived to satisfy the demands of awakened but as yet uninstructed sense. The distress over the manifestation of personality in others, is its writhings in ourselves; its aggressive manifestations through us are really its fighting back. Growth towards impersonality consists in the destruction of these manifestations in ourselves. All effort at destruction of it outside of ourselves is a shirking of our own problem.
Sometimes the letter of Christian Science is used for gain or notoriety. Then personality changes from its unconscious form to hypocrisy. Dishonest, perverted personality becomes so impersonal as to steal what it can of Christian Science without acknowledgment of its Founder. This dishonesty shelters itself under the declaration that Truth belongs to no one, and cries out against personality, while it fills columns of the daily papers with advertisements of itself. The thief of material things reasons in the same way, on a lower plane. He says the possessor of what he wants has no right to it, and that he is keeping others out of their own.
The Robert Macaire, pistols in belt, that voices the thieves' morality from the stage where unconscious mortal mind looks on at mimic presentations of itself, is the type of the higher evolution of mortal mind that comes out on the stage of liberated mind, perverted to evil, and preaches impersonality while it steals, and perverts what it steals.
