Article March 16, 1974 Issue

What Caused This?

ELIZABETH S. MURRAY

When something adverse happens to us, we sometimes ask, What caused this? We may dig into the whys and wherefores of symptoms and become more deeply involved with the difficulty than with its spiritual resolution. But no matter what the apparent cause, discord and evil have no real existence. Evil is not a power or a thing. God, Spirit, is the only power, the only creator, the only cause, the only Mind or intelligence, the only substance. Everything in His universe reflects Him, expresses good, is the result of this perfect cause.

Mrs. Eddy writes: "There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause."^{Science and Health, p. 207;} Fear drops away as we contemplate the fact that God, divine Principle, causes everything real and the real is always good. If it seems otherwise to us, this is an illusion of the material senses. Speaking of such a notion that immortal Spirit can cause and inhabit mortality, Mrs. Eddy says, "As Christian Science repudiates self-evident impossibilities, the material senses must father these absurdities, for both the material senses and their reports are unnatural, impossible, and unreal."^{ibid., pp. 550-551;}

Our endeavor to find the cause of a problem may uncover a claim that we can then deny more specifically on the basis of its nothingness. But we must learn progressively to look upon evil as only a distortion of material sense imagined by mortal mind, the belief of a power other than good. We then begin to cast that belief out of our thought and our lives. We are not deceived any longer, because we know better.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

The Divine Architecture of Home