NONE OF US , wherever we live, should allow ourselves to argue that evil can overpower goodness, or that good is impotent in the face of malevolence. I've found the temptation to succumb to a mindset that typecasts people according to certain primordial qualities is a mental straitjacket that needs challenging and rejecting. This happens in thought.

For example, I lived and reported from Moscow in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, and recall how easy it was to slip into cynicism about Russia. The apparent retrogression toward political totalitarianism and corruption is tragically documented in Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia, republished last year, shortly after she was murdered. Indeed, it's widely held she was gunned down because she courageously reported the deeply corrosive corruption of Russia's oligarchs, their mafias, and a growing sense of political hopelessness that reminds people inside Russia and elsewhere of the sinister aspects of Stalinism.

To counter such trends, it's helpful to turn to the Bible, which contains many examples of evil foiled. Esau's hostile intents toward his brother, Jacob, were neutralized by prayer in their last encounter. Saul repeatedly tried to kill David and failed every time when David asked God what to do. Once, Pharisaical hatred of Jesus drove his enemies to attempt to push him over a cliff at Nazareth, but their efforts were thwarted because Jesus recognized the impotence of evil and the mighty reality of God, who is wholly good (see Luke 4:14–32). In every instance, whether Biblical or contemporary, the real solution is spiritual, not material.

There never was a spiritual vacuum in the bare-knuckled politics of the Bible, or in Russia's darkest days of the Bolshevik Terror—nor is there one today. The founder of this magazine, who often used Mind as a synonym for God, wrote, "The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality" (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 469).

Nothing can extinguish humanity's faith in and love of God, the Father and Mother of all. No force can overwhelm God's law or His spiritual order. Acknowledgment of God's love for each of us mitigates human fear. Nobody has an inherent predilection for despotism. God is always in action transforming and leavening human thought. The Christ, God's divine manifestation, is powerful and dissolves the atheism of materialism.

During Russia's Soviet years, when atheism was official policy and religion was rigorously discouraged, a charming story circulated among Muscovites about an elderly babushka whose love of God could not be extinguished. According to accounts at the time, Yuri Gagarin, the first Soviet cosmonaut in space, was triumphantly touring the Soviet Union. In one city, this babushka persistently followed Gagarin, asking him, "What did He look like?" Annoyed, Gagarin ultimately took notice of the woman and asked, "What did who look like?" With unquestioning faith, the babushka is said to have asked the first man in space, "God! When you saw the face of God in heaven, what did He look like?"

Gagarin reportedly brushed off the inquiry, declaring he didn't see God in the heavens. The Soviet state used the incident to reinforce official policy that there was no God. Yet neither God nor His goodness was ever absent in Russia. And the divine qualities of tenderness, generosity, affection, integrity, courage, and intelligence are still present today. Humankind's divinely derived qualities can never be driven underground or eclipsed.

Even amid officially orchestrated hostility toward the United States during the Cold War, those of us who lived and worked as journalists in Moscow fondly remember ordinary Russians as being among the greatest reservoirs of goodwill toward Americans anywhere in the world, despite government enmity.

Amid today's appalling poverty and state indifference in Russia, Anna Politkovskaya profiled Russian mothers, judges, and military officers, whom she described as "spiritually healthy people." By example, they are demonstrating selflessness, dedication, and integrity in a society where it is all too tempting to see only corruption and despotism.

Tsar Peter the Great is reputed to have said that "Russia is the place where things that just don't happen, happen." In Russia in recent decades, where others may have seen only grasping materialism and violence, my experience there revealed deep reserviors of individual goodness, generosity, and decency. Science and Health says, "The spiritual reality is the scientific fact in all things" (p. 207). And the spiritual fact remains: God is the only power.

Each of us needs to be alert never to write off God's expression—men and women and children—anywhere. And although the effects of our prayers may sometimes be unseen to us, our affirmations of God's omnipotence and omnipresence are felt—and are much more powerful than we can imagine. CSS