"There is no power apart from God. Omnipotence has all-power, and to acknowledge any other power is to dishonor God." So writes Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, on page 228 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."

The human family believes in matter as having power, and in evil as having power to overcome good. Yet the Scriptures unequivocally declare, "Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all." Which are we going to accept? On which foundation are we going to build—the shifting sands of fallible human ways and means, or the infallible ways and means of God's law and government, the law which says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"?

Jesus of Nazareth knew God's law—knew its potency, its presence, its availability. He built his church upon the rock, Truth, upon the spiritual recognition of the healing Christ, the supremacy of Spirit. Our church is built upon this foundation. And the so-called evil forces of the world—paganism, atheism, mesmerism—are claiming to assault the very foundations of that church. We need to be alert to this covertly active menace, though undismayed, remembering Jesus' emphatic declaration that the gates of hell should not prevail against the church which is built upon the rock, Truth. Wherein lay Jesus' fearless confidence? In his understanding and awareness of the fact that in reality there is no evil. Knowing God, good, to be the only creator, he based his every thought, word, and act upon the simple yet incontestable logic that since God, good, made all, and since God, good, did not and could not make evil, evil never was made; hence its nonexistence, its unreality.

The Bible gives many instances of seemingly inevitable defeat, in the experience of Moses, Joshua, Elisha, David, Nehemiah, Jehoshaphat, all pressed to "man's extremity," yet all standing in the law of God, proving the power of good over evil and going forward in spiritual victory. Later, the extermination of the followers of Christ Jesus and his teachings was attempted. But the Christ-idea, glimpsed by the early prophets and revealed in full radiance by Jesus, maintained its chain of light down through the ages until, centuries later, the Science of Christ was revealed to the pure consciousness of Mary Baker Eddy and given to struggling humanity through the clear transparency of her spiritualized thought. And so, today, armed with the proofs of God's saving power, we can and must traverse the seeming wilderness in full faith of final victorious emergence, with songs of praise for God's sure deliverance in our hearts and on our lips.

We have the weapons—the invisible weapons of Michael and Gabriel, spiritual strength and healing love—with which to uncover and destroy the hidden, serpentine mesmerism of evil; and we must keep awake, ever on the alert to deny the mesmeric suggestions which would lull our thinking into an acceptance of the belief of futility in resisting evil and of the inevitability of defeat, knowing them to be powerless because good alone is power.

With what joy can we rear our mental defenses and wage our mental offensives against evil in all its spurious claims, overcoming them through scientifically understanding the nothingness of evil and the all-sufficiency of good. Never before was there such a need to stand as vigilant sentinels at the door of our thinking, constantly on the alert to admit only that which we would have externalized in human experience. Wakefulness, vigilance, steadfastness, and radical reliance on God should be our constant mental doorkeepers.

Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 14), "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth." The truth expressed in that statement has power to dissipate completely the miasma of aggressive mental suggestions, and to lift our thought to the contemplation of the real, to God's kingdom, the only kingdom there is in reality, to God's law and government, to the peace which Christ Jesus bequeathed to the world, yea, to the imperishable glory of God's oneness and allness.

Christian Scientists know the truth, the divinely revealed truth about the real universe and the real man, the unvierse and man created and forever maintained by the one God, the one Mind, the one indestructible power; and in this truth can we stand, rejoicing in the proven knowledge that God, good, is All, hence evil is nothing, and though evil join hand with evil, nothing added to nothing is still nothing. Thus may we say with the confidence and conviction of Paul, "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

When we learn that God is omnipotent, ever-present, infinite Love, in whose infinity there is and can be no hate; that He is eternal Life, in whose eternality there is and can be no end, no death; that He is invincible Truth, in whose inviolability there is and can enter no error; that He is almighty Mind, wherein there is no mesmerism, no confusion, no war, and when we know our true selfhood to be ever at one with Him, then are we indeed acquainted with Him and at peace here and now, abiding securely in the glorious majesty of the one power.