Editorial February 19, 1938 Issue

Omnipotent Good

George Shaw Cook

It is probable that most Christians would agree with the statement that God is good and that He is omnipotent. And yet many times in daily experience this is virtually denied by the admission that evil, in some of its forms, is real and has power. For example, even those who are professed Christians often admit, quite readily, that sin and sickness have power. They seem to lose sight of the fact that such an admission would stultify the statement that God, good, is omnipotent. Christian Science helps one to see that acceptance of the truth of God's omnipotence and goodness precludes the possibility of believing in the power of evil.

Mary Baker Eddy, on page 587 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," defines "good" as follows: "God; Spirit; omnipotence; omniscience; omnipresence; omniaction." If one accepts this definition as being correct, one cannot possibly subscribe to the proposition that God is both good and evil, or that evil has any actual existence, presence, or power. Since God, good, is infinite and therefore omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and omniactive, it is evident that evil has no presence, no power, no Science, no action. Evil is in fact without entity.

In another place in the Christian Science textbook (ibid., p. 186) its author says: "Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of truth. It is nothing, because it is the absence of something. It is unreal, because it presupposes the absence of God, the omnipotent and omnipresent." To admit then that evil is present or has power is to presuppose the absence of God, who is omnipresent good. Since evil itself is a negation—the suppositional absence of good— all of its seeming conditions are wholly negative. Thus it is seen that sin is but the seeming absence of the ever-present goodness, purity, integrity, and perfection of God. Sickness is but the supposititious absence of health, an entirely impossible thing, because health, spiritual wholeness, is the ever-present condition of God's being, which man reflects. Death, or what appears to the material senses to be a death-process, is but the seeming absence of God, who is omnipresent and omnipotent Life.

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