The lecture given by a clergyman and reported in your paper has a reference to the teaching of Christian Science with respect to evil, which I think would be interesting to examine. He declared that according to Christian Science evil was a fanciful creation, whereas he declared for himself that it was on the contrary very real. Man, he explained, was possessed of free will and rationality, and when he abused this, evil originated in him and not outside him. The serpent, he further declared, stood for sensuous man, and woman for the emotional nature. He wound up by saying that this sensuous nature was very good in its own place, but was no guide to great moral and spiritual issues.

I think it will be admitted by most people who read the report of this address, that, having started out to explain the origin of evil, he left it exactly where it was, while during the process he made several statements which he would find it extremely difficult to reconcile with the teaching of the Bible. First of all, Christian Science does not say that evil is a fanciful creation. What it does say is, that evil is an unreality; that is to say, it is no part of the creation of God. To the human senses, however, it is as real as any other lie, till that lie is exposed. "To assume," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 447 of Science and Health, "that there are no claims of evil and yet to indulge them, is a moral offense." The only way to prove the unreality of evil, is by reaching that understanding of divine Principle which enabled Jesus to say, "The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me." The Christian Science teaching with respect to evil is, as a matter of fact, exactly that of the Founder of Christianity when he said: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." Speaking in the metaphorical language of the day, he personified evil as the devil, but he went on carefully to show that just as a lie has no reality, so there is no reality in the lie of evil.

Now a lie is not a reality; it is the suppostitious denial of a reality. The deliberate acceptance of evil could never rationally occur, and yet this critic says that God gave man free will and rationality, and that his abuse of this was the origin of evil. The evil, he insists, originated in man, not outside of him; but man, the Bible says, is the image and likeness of God; therefore, according to the critic, evil originated in the image and likeness of God. Christian Science says that the image and likeness of God is absolutely sinless, that it reflects perfectly the divine Mind which created it, and that the sinful human being is not the image and likeness of God, but the supposititious counterfeit of this image and likeness.

Jesus said, "The flesh profiteth nothing." Would the critic like to argue that God made as His image and likeness something that profiteth nothing, and in which evil originated,—if evil originated in the image and likeness of God, or if it originated in God, unless there are two creators? The Bible says that God made all that was made. If evil is real, then it was made by God. The alternative is that God did not make all that was made, which would limit the infinity of God as well as His omnipotence. To argue that evil orginated outside God, is to argue not only that there are two first causes, but that God is not omnipotent. Yet the Bible says that God created all that was made, and created it good. If He created everything, and created that everything good, and evil is real, then He created evil and created evil good.

There is no possibility by which the gentleman can hope to escape from this entanglement. It is the old dilemma which gave rise to Gnosticism in the primitive Christian church. The Gnostics put the case quite clearly as to how evil could originate from an entirely good First Cause, and how Spirit could possibly be confined to matter. That was one of the first controversies of the Christian church, and what are termed the orthodox churches never have answered it, and never will be able answer it so long as they insist on the reality of evil.

The critic, however, created other difficulties for himself as he advanced. The serpent, he said, stood for sensuous man, yet he went on to say that sensuous nature was good in its own place, but was no guide in great moral and spiritual issues. Now, if God created everything, and if the human being is the image and likeness of God, who created the serpent and sensuous man? Either the serpent—whether you take it as a type of evil or not is quite immaterial—was created by God, or else it has a supposititious existence. If it was created by God, then God created sensuality. If sensuality was not created by God, what did it originate in, if God made all that was made and made it good? Again, what is the critic's authority for describing woman as the type of the emotional nature? It is quite clear that if God created the one, He created the other, and that if He did not create the one or the other, they originated somewhere, if they are real. Where could they have originated but in God, if God created all things? But He created all things good: therefore sensuality and emotion and good. Yet the critic says they are no guide in great moral and spiritual issues.

Christian Science attributes just the same reality to sensuality and to emotion as it does to evil. That is to say, it includes in the term evil, everything which is unlike God. In doing this, it goes very much beyond the critic in what it considers to be the gamut of evil. It says that the ordinary sins of commission are sins admitted by everybody, but it insists that the sin of omission is none the less a sin. To take a specific example. A man who gets a headache as a result of drunkenness is guilty of an obvious sin in commission; all the world admits that. Christian Science, however, goes father. It says that a man who believes that a headache is real, is guilty of sin because he has been believing in something apart from God. That was why Jesus said, "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?" In plain English, Christian Science includes as sin many things the ordinary world regards as natural effects, such as sensuous nature and emotionalism; it does not, however, handicap itself in the attempt to destroy the false belief in these by insisting that they are real. And if the critic is going to explain that Christian Science denies the reality of evil, he must begin by quoting the definition of sin, which is everything unlike God.

The origin of evil never has been discovered, and it never will be discovered, for the simple reason that if it could be discovered, that moment it would become real. Again and again Jesus showed in his teaching that man is the image and likeness of God, and his command to the world was, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." If evil is real, it is part of the divine consciousness, and it can never be destroyed,—unless divine Mind is to be made finite by being deprived of some knowledge of reality. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with its fruit of death, would become the type of the eternal, and it would be in no case possible for man to escape from the presence of sin.