Editorial April 12, 1969 Issue

Dealing with Negation

Helen Wood Bauman

Perhaps nothing in Mary Baker Eddy's discovery of Christian Science, the truth that Christ Jesus demonstrated, is more effective in helping people than her logical deduction that since God is good, is All, and is supreme over all, evil is a negation. She explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of truth. It is nothing, because it is the absence of something. It is unreal, because it presupposes the absence of God, the omnipotent and omnipresent." ^{Science and Health, p. 186;}

This deduction meets with incredulity even in the Christian world; but it accords with the long-neglected teaching of Jesus that the devil, or evil, is "a liar" and that "there is no truth in him." ^{John 8:44;} The Master's control over negatives of God's creation—lies about it —is proof that he was teaching something vastly important. Because countless earnest Christians have not grasped Jesus' explanation of evil, they have been slow in fulfilling the possibilities of power that lie within the knowledge of his explanation. Christian Science is constantly proving that evil is a supposition, never a fact, a negation that must be dealt with as such.

We learn through this Science that everything is mental—in the mind—and that we are always dealing with mental concepts, even when objects appear to material sense to be solid substance external to the mind. Then, any trouble we encounter is in the lying sense that presents an inverted picture of God's concepts. Mrs. Eddy puts it clearly in these words: "Material sense defines all things materially, and has a finite sense of the infinite." ^{Science and Health, p. 208}

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