Article February 4, 1922 ISSUE

"Thou art of purer eyes"

GROVER CLEVELAND MIDDLETON

Perhaps no statement of Christian Science is more farreaching or of greater import than that of Mary Baker Eddy's, on page 330 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she says, "Evil is nothing, no thing, mind, nor power." This profound and abstract statement may be seemingly more difficult to understand at this time when the world is apparently in the grasp of evil in the form of turmoil and strife of various types. An unprejudiced study of the Bible in the light which Christian Science throws upon it, however, will disclose the undeniable fact that God, good, is the only cause, intelligence, or power. Moreover, it will also be clearly seen that evil can have no place or presence in the all-inclusive kingdom of good.

That there was something apart from God, good, called evil, and that God knew it, was the claim of the serpentine talker as recorded in the third chapter of Genesis, and a further perusal of this book shows the self-imposed suffering brought upon mankind as the result of this erroneous belief. One need but turn through the pages of mortal history to find the unmistakable evidence of this certain but wholly avoidable punishment. The penalty imposed by this transgression will continue just so long as men believe in evil. For the knowledge of good, which is the only knowledge man can acquire, necessarily precludes the knowledge of anything unlike itself, and thus forever seals the doom of evil, confirming the Scriptural quotation, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Since God, good, is self-existent and eternal, man in His image and likeness is immortal, and dies not; therefore, this passage of scripture must refer only to the suppositional sense of evil, which is the only thing that can die, or more accurately stated, pass away. Now if a knowledge of evil bears the fruits of death, God must not know evil, else He would Himself be extinguished. It is well for us that the divine Mind knows only good, for what Mind knows is real and forever established, and man is subjected only to Mind's eternal sway. Thus sin, sickness, and death cannot be the inevitable experience of all, and there is true hope for suffering humanity. As Mrs. Eddy says on page 3 of "Unity of Good": "God is All-in-all. Hence He is in Himself only, in His own nature and character, and is perfect being, or consciousness. He is all the Life and Mind there is or can be. Within Himself is every embodiment of Life and Mind."

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