Personal love is little better than personal hate; both bringeth a snare, for their foundations are error, viz., Intelligence in matter, and we cling to them, only because we have not reached higher; not that God is found in them, but that we are groping darkly for Him where He is not, when there is no place where His voice is not to be heard. Is there one individual putting off the “old man” and “putting on the new,” who has not felt the loss of personal pleasures and pains? yea, and of personal friends, before he found what belongs not to person, namely, the enlargement of his being in Love and Wisdom that reaches beyond personal pain or pleasure. The loss of a friend has, perhaps, given you the explanation of this. Pain quickly informs us that personal pleasure is mortal, and that both are error.
A sinner believes, momentarily, he is happier for wrong-doing, and another man that he suffers for doing right; the one is a belief of personal pleasure, and the other of pain, but both are false. God is not the author of personal sense, or discord. Would existence seem blank without a personal friend? then the time cometh when you will feel this solitariness, and when this vacuum must be filled with Principle, instead of person, and with the Love that is God. When this hour for development arrives, you will suffer from personal enemies so severely it will cause you to approach more readily the science that destroys all personal trust and gives you higher joys, even as pain is salutary in taking away a belief of pleasure in sense. These are the footsteps of science, by which Truth amputates error. Our individuality is never lost; but the belief
