In the degree that we believe the universe, including man, is controlled by two opposing causes, one material and the other spiritual, we are adopting the world's theory of dualism and subjecting ourselves to dispositional faults, inconsistencies, and limitations. Wrong notions about personality or individuality, originating in false education and its beliefs of heredity, environment, and circumstance, narrow the lives of men and women by hiding from them their spiritual identities and capabilities as children of God. Christian Science is the Comforter for these, as well as for the physically depleted, because it educates mortal mind out of its restrictive sense of self and reveals the freedom of man's spiritual nature.
A material sense of personality, being the product of belief in dualism, embodies the conditions of a contradictory, mortal mind, but God's child does not express dualism in any form. That which appears to be unconformable in temperament is the seeming mingling in human consciousness of spiritual individuality and a material sense of personality. Through progressive study of the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, students of Christian Science are learning to do away with the effects of this seeming mingling. They are replacing the counterfeit concept of personality with the right understanding of true selfhood, which is always spiritual and forever individual. As they do this, they are freed from false beliefs about personality, and man's true identity is seen as the individual reflection of the one infinite Person, or divine Principle, God.
True personality is as genuine as Mind and is infinitely expressed through God's ideas. In answer to the query, "Do Christian Scientists believe in personality?" Mrs. Eddy replies (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 5): "They do, but their personality is defined spiritually, not materially—by Mind, not by matter. We do not blot out the material race of Adam, but leave all sin to God's fiat—self-extinction, and to the final manifestation of the real spiritual man and universe. We believe, according to the Scriptures, that God is infinite Spirit or Person, and man is His image and likeness: therefore man reflects Spirit, not matter."
