Article September 26, 1908 Issue

God is Spirit, or Mind. . . .

Alfred Farlow

The Mid-Western

God is Spirit, or Mind. The result of mind labor, mind action, mind exercise—the product of mind—is thought. Mind thinks its thought, evolves its idea; its creation is therefore ideal. We do not look upon darkness as an entity. It is not regarded as something, but as the want of something, the want of light. So evil should be understood as the absence of good, disease the want of health, discord the lack of harmony. If we plant ourselves unreservedly upon the premise that God is Spirit and the only creator, and are faithful thereto, we must hold that His creation is spiritual—the infinite expression of infinite Mind. If we stick to our text, hold to the foregoing premise, we must regard all which is seen or perceived, physically, as illusion. God created all that was made, and it was very good; hence evil has no creator, no source, and therefore has only a mythical existence.

The appearance of evil is a false claim which must have hearing at the bar of Truth and be proved a nonentity. One cannot be aware of the omnipotence of God without realizing the impotence of sin and disease. If God becomes to us infinitely great, His opposite, evil, must become to us infinitesimal—infinitely small. We cannot believe in the greatness of God without seeing the littleness of evil. The prayer of a Christian Scientist brings one into communion with God, into a realization of His presence and power, into the consciousness of man's real being, and this breaks the power of sin and disease. Sin should be defined as the conduct of mortals induced by a wrong sense and consequent misappropriation of God's creation. Sin includes, therefore, all the mistakes of life as well as wilful wickedness—all errors in thought, word, and deed. All sin is instigated by ignorance—the false belief that there is pleasure, profit, gain, or benefit in error. Therefore, the remedy for sin is practice prompted by a knowledge of the bliss of doing good and the inevitable penalty of wrongdoing. Mortals must learn that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

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