Article May 5, 1917 Issue

The Allness of God, Good

STOKES ANTHONY BENNETT

In the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy it is written, "The Lord he is God; there is none else beside him." This idea is repeated in several other instances in the Old Testament, and in Paul's epistle to the Ephesians we read of "one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." It would therefore seem that no well informed Bible student, be he theologian or layman, would ever be led to think or to declare that there is in reality any other power than God, or that he would ever allow himself to criticize or to oppose Christian Science for teaching and demonstrating that "God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All" (Science and Health, p. 17).

Every Christian believes God to be good, and also to be Love, as the Scriptures over and over again affirm. Now, since God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, it is self-evident that divine goodness and Love is the only power, presence, and intelligence, the only reality and activity in the universe. This means, then, that God is the maker of all that truly and eternally is, and that the entire creation is also good and perfect, even as it is pronounced in the opening chapter of Genesis. We thus arrive at the logical and sound conclusion that, because God is good and is All, evil, the asserted opposite of good, is necessarily unreal and untrue, having neither power, presence, nor entity. This is precisely what Christ Jesus meant to convey when in defining the devil, or personified evil, he said: "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 [the lie]."

Christ Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, "God is a Spirit," and here we see that, because God is Spirit and omnipotent, Spirit is infinite and supreme. It therefore follows that matter, with its every law and condition, is but a deception, an illusion, a nothingness, as was demonstrated by the Master in those important works which were simply the natural results of the perfect spiritual understanding which Christ Jesus had. Because God is omnipotent Spirit, goodness, and Love, He could not by any process of consistent reasoning be the creator, sustainer, or approver of aught that is unspiritual, fleshly, and material,—sin, sickness, sorrow, limitation, lack, inharmony, death,—and scientifically speaking these things do not exist any more than a mistake in mathematics or in music really exists. The mistake only seems to exist to that mentality which does not rightly understand mathematics or music, and is wholly unknown to and unsupported by the basic law of numbers or of harmony. And so it is with Deity, the perfect divine Principle of the Science of true, eternal being: He neither knows, countenances, nor permits so-called error, or evil; to Him there is no error, no evil.

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The Allness of God, Good

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