Article May 27, 1911 Issue

In the course of her explanation of the scientific teaching...

Frederick Dixon

Cheltenham (Eng.) Examiner

In the course of her explanation of the scientific teaching of Jesus, Mrs. Eddy had to deal with that storm-center of theology, the origin of evil. No one has ever yet discovered the origin of evil, and no one ever will succeed in doing so, for the simple reason that if the origin of evil could be discovered, evil would ipso facto be proved real, and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would be revealed as the truth. Mrs. Eddy, following the teaching of Jesus, declares that evil is an illusion.

The Christian religion maintains that God created all things that were created, and created them good. It is this most absolute statement of the unreality of evil which has been a thorn in the flesh of the orthodox churches for centuries, and which drove some of the early Christians into Gnosticism. This absolute statement is either true or it is not true. If it is true, then nothing which is not good was ever created by God, and if it was not created by God, what was it that created it, and where, if its creator was not created, did the creation come from? The Bible says that God created man in His own image and likeness. Now, God is Spirit, therefore the image and likeness of God is spiritual and not material. This is the exact statement which Mrs. Eddy has made, on page 468 of Science and Health, where she says that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation," and that, therefore, "man is not material; he is spiritual." Now, if evil is not God-created, it can only exist as an illusion, and the only way it is possible to fathom the nothingness of that illusion is by learning to understand the allness of God.

No man can prove a negative. The only way in which it is possible to comprehend a negative is by mastering the positive. In the exact proportion in which a man begins to understand the positive, he begins to learn the nothingness of the negation. The only way in which it is possible to realize the nothingness of the illusion of evil is by learning the allness of God. This knowledge of God is the knowledge of the truth which Jesus declared would free the world—from what but the belief in the reality and power of evil? "Ye shall know the truth," he said, "and the truth shall make you free." In similar language, the epistles speak, as has been shown, of the absolute or scientific knowledge of God, that is of Truth; and so, in the same way, according to one of the greatest of our bishop-scholars, the Greek text of the fourth gospel separates the absolute from relative truth by a particular use of the definite article, showing that Jesus sometimes spoke of the absolute truth, the fact of the allness of God, and sometimes of the relative, human sense of truth, which teaches a belief in sorrow and sickness and sin. "Sickness," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 460 of Science and Health, "is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."

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