Article June 13, 1953 Issue

"THE AWFUL UNREALITY CALLED EVIL"

BESSIE L. CARN

A subject which most people consider difficult to understand about the teaching of Christian Science is the unreality of matter, or evil. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy speaks of the three great verities of Spirit as omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and she says (p. 110), "These eternal verities reveal primeval existence as the radiant reality of God's creation, in which all that He has made is pronounced by His wisdom good." In the next paragraph she adds, "Thus it was that I beheld, as never before, the awful unreality called evil."

In this connection, the writer once heard an experienced Christian Scientist make this thought-arresting statement in referring to evil: "It would be awful, if it were real." At that time she did not fully comprehend the spiritual significance of the speaker's words, but after she had gained through the study of Christian Science a scientific understanding of God's allness as Spirit and of matter's nothingness she found that, whenever faced with an aggressive, frightening aspect of evil, she was always alerted by this statement not to accept the testimony of material sense as true, but to deny it with spiritual understanding.

Christian Science makes it plain that dominion over matter, or material sense, is achieved only in the proportion that material concepts, theories, and illusions are relinquished and thinking is spiritualized. The student of this Science learns to acknowledge God, good, alone as real and to deny evil either existence, power, place, or intelligence on the basis that God never created it. Since evil exists nowhere except in human belief, the Christian Scientist learns to view sin, disease, and other earthly inharmonies as false claims of mortal mind rather than as material conditions or physical realities. In every circumstance requiring it he denies the suggestion that matter is real and disease a bodily condition. When evil is seen merely as an erroneous belief of mortal mind, it yields to the realization of the truth and disappears. The spiritual understanding that knows evil's utter nothingness destroys it.

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