Article December 18, 1948 Issue

NO MEMORY OF EVIL

CHARLES PORTER LOWES

The Biblical account of the deliverance of the three Hebrew youths from the fiery furnace, as related in the book of Daniel, has always been a source of inspiration and comfort in its assurance of God's power to protect and save mankind from adversity. Their courageous stand for right, together with their faith in and obedience to spiritual ways and means to preserve them, gave these three young captives such a sense of the nearness of God that the ordeal through which they passed did not touch them. Not only were they unharmed, but there was no evidence left to remind them of their experience, for we read in the book of Daniel (3:27), "And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king's counsellors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them."

If sometimes during the course of our daily affairs we find ourselves confronted with a trying situation or testing time, we too can turn so completely to God that the dark cloud which seems to engulf us will disappear before our spiritually awakened consciousness. Evil cannot enter the secret place of our communion with the Most High, where God and His idea forever dwell in peace. In the very presence of God, where Love enfolds its own, there is no unsolved problem, cruel injustice, or human suffering. Sudden fear, self-pity, or doubt can never dim the brightness of God's glory or separate God and man.

A subtle suggestion of the tempter, or mortal mind, is that we have already passed through a fiery trial, and that it still harasses us by arguing for further recognition. In the light of spiritual understanding, as revealed in Christian Science, negative beliefs can be quickly detected as mere vagaries of material sense and thus rendered powerless, without the ability to leave a trace or to blemish our God-given harmony. The only power mortal mind seems to have is what we give it. Error must be seen for what it is, namely, a falsity, having no real existence. An untoward condition is never real; it is only a mirage of mortal mind. It never really happens or touches our true, immutable selfhood, which is always perfect and never in need of healing.

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