Article November 25, 1911 Issue

THE IMPERSONAL TREATMENT OF EVIL

SAMUEL GREENWOOD.

A point which Mrs. Eddy makes clear throughout all her writings is that evil cannot be treated or dealt with as a person. Since evil is not something which can be grasped with the hand or seen with the eye, it obviously cannot be overcome upon any material or personal basis. Christian Science offers the only practical solution for this problem, on the ground that evil exists only as the belief that there is an opposite reality to good, which would create man in God's unlikeness.

Christian Science designates this a false belief because, since God is acknowledged to be supreme, omnipotent, and omnipresent, there could be no opposite power or existence except in a suppositional sense. This belief is not and never was a person, any more than the belief that the earth is flat was ever a person. This supposition or belief did not originate with Adam, any more than it can be said to originate with mortals of the present day. It is shown to be no part of any individual, for as it disappears before the growing recognition of good, the person in the case feels himself becoming not less but more of a man in consequence. The position of Christian Science is sustained by the demonstrable fact that evil influences cease in the ratio that one yields to the government of good, and this leads to the inevitable conclusion that evil could have no power whatever over one whose consciousness is wholly filled with good.

The belief in personal evil has led mortals, from Cain downward, to turn their hand against each other, in the delusion that the removal of the personal offender would remove the cause of their dislike and fear. Even the children of Israel, although representing an advancing concept of God, believed their enemies to be persons instead of evil beliefs, and that they were accomplishing their own deliverance and fulfilling the divine will in slaying them; but history shows that evil has never been lessened or destroyed by such means. The destruction of the person has never helped nations or individuals to vanquish wrong, and each successive generation has had to cope with the same evils as its predecessor, the only relief being found in rising to a higher sense of brotherhood, mercy, and justice.

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