The ancient Greeks called all foreigners barbarians, the Jews classified outsiders as Gentiles and were forbidden by their traditions from associating with them. It was, therefore, a great shock to Peter's racial and religious susceptibilities when he was made to realize that "God is no respecter of persons." The vision of the sheet containing all manner of four-footed animals, and the command, "Arise, Peter; slay and eat," was needed to arouse him from his narrow Jewish concept of God. Thereafter he responded gladly to the call for help from Cornelius, the Roman centurion. In a world of restricted travel every secluded community is apt to consider itself the special object of divine favor and other communities proportionately in disfavor. Until the nothingness of material existence is realized God is believed to make distinctions between persons.
If the term person is used spiritually and not materially, then it is permissible to speak of the real man as person and of God as the infinite Person. Scholastic theology has, however, so beclouded the use of the word person that in Christian Science the term Principle is preferably applied to Deity and image or idea to man. It is certain that God loves and is therefore a respecter of His own ideas, the children of His creation, the expression of His own intelligence. The teaching of Christian Science on this point is perfectly clear, and is thus stated by Mrs. Eddy on page 116 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "As the words person and personal are commonly and ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity, to confused and erroneous conceptions of divinity and its distinction from humanity. If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is infinite Person,—in the sense of infinite personality, but not in the lower sense. An infinite Mind in a finite form is an absolute impossibility."
The lesson Peter learned by his vision comes to all spiritually minded individuals sooner or later. Beholding the unsubstantiality of physical life and the eternal nature of life in God, the advancing Christian is led to understand that God, who is Mind, Spirit, cannot recognize material personalities. He cannot, from the very nature of His being, be a respecter of material persons. From the moment when this is clearly seen the correct thinker feels the walls of separation between men and nations fall as did those of Jericho before the trumpet blasts of the children of Israel. The narrow, parochial, local barriers fade away, national and racial distinctions outlined by matter disappear, and the new family or nation rises out of the debris of discarded beliefs, so that "in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him."
