Article October 9, 1920 Issue

No Evil in God

J. MARGUERITE BROWN

The topic of conversation was earthquakes. The one uninstructed in Christian Science insisted that God used this material means to shake His children up for their sinful disobedience; that God was conscious of evil because He had put Adam and Eve into the garden of Eden, where they found the forbidden fruit. Therefore God knew evil and He used it for His own good purpose, and earthquakes were created by Him. The Christian Scientist knew that the first chapter of Genesis contained the record of the true creation; that God had created man in His own image and likeness. The forbidden fruit which Adam and Eve had eaten was the belief of the reality of matter, or in other words, the testimony of the material senses. The tree of life which is ever sustaining the man of God is the eternal reality of man's oneness with his creator. Now man's oneness means man's complete, indestructible, exact ability to express infinite Life, Mind, Truth, Love, good, Principle, Spirit, Soul.

The story of the Adam and Eve creation was merely an allegory of the claim that there could be more than all there is; but God, good, is infinite, therefore God is All and evil simply is not. The only Eden or pleasure the idea of God could have is pleasure in expressing Mind. Since Mind is all, matter does not exist, and there can be no pleasure in it. Then there remains nothing for God to punish His creation for. God is not made after the pattern of mortal man, as we had thought before studying Christian Science. We can always rest assured that anything that seems to have an element of destruction is not of God's creation and is therefore nonexistent. If God's creation should cease to exist for one moment then there would be no creator or God, for one is dependent upon the other to form complete oneness. Mathematical problems are not worked with numbers only; their rules must be known and used. There must also be numbers to express the basis of mathematics. The working together of numbers in accord with their basis constitutes their oneness. The working together of Mind and its idea constitutes their oneness. Jesus showed this clearly when he said, "I and my Father are one," and, "The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works."

God is ever present Love and is "of purer eyes than to behold evil." He does not use matter in any form to correct His idea, the ever present expression of infinite Life, Truth, and Love. To human sense it seems that God chasteneth; "for whom the Lord loveth he correcteth," but this correction is the activity of Love and constructiveness and not the hate and destructiveness of mortal mind. As a man learns through Christian Science that the hate and destructiveness which nature seems to express are but the illusion of mortal mind,—since mortal mind sees only what it believes,—he will be able to destroy this illusion in the same manner as Jesus calmed the wind and the waves, and as David replaced the concept of bestial ferocity with moral courage. Mrs. Eddy explains this clearly on page 293 of Science and Health, where she says, "There is no vapid fury of mortal mind—expressed in earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity—and this so-called mind is self-destroyed. The manifestations of evil, which counterfeit divine justice, are called in the Scriptures, 'The anger of the Lord.' In reality, they show the self-destruction of error or matter and point to matter's opposite, the strength and permanency of Spirit. Christian Science brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal harmony, the entireness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil."

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