What do you mean, "unreal"?
A friend of mine and her husband belong to a Quaker colony that is devoting itself to the alleviation of the local people's many needs. The couple are living in a particularly troubled part of the world, where they sometimes witness senseless cruelty. Is it any wonder that she asked me in one of her letters: "How can Christian Scientists believe that evil is unreal?" Very likely others who are little acquainted with this Science wonder about that, too.
Christian Science stresses the importance of understanding the meaning of "real" and "unreal." Without this understanding, one may accuse Scientists of being heartless. With it, he can help bring about evil's ultimate downfall.
What Christian Science accepts as real is epitomized by a few profound words in its textbook, Science and Health, where Mrs. Eddy writes, "That only is real which reflects God." Science and Health, p. 478 . This statement is firmly based on the record of creation in Genesis: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Gen. 1:31 . If all that is divinely created is good and real, then what is not good is not divinely created and is therefore not, in the most fundamental sense, real.
Those who follow this line of thought do so not to turn their back on evil as though it didn't exist, but rather as a basis for proving evil's unreality. To do this and let good, God's presence, radiate to bless mankind is not always easy. But it is necessary, for when we understand that evil was never divinely created, evil can be overcome. By not granting it the authority it is constantly screaming for, we can watch Truth wipe it out.
Consider Christ Jesus' triumphs over evil. Could he have healed as he did if he had looked at evil as real, as God-created?
The night after I had started thinking about this subject I had a bad headache. I realized very clearly that aches are not part of God's perfect creation, and this caused the headache to fade away. The next morning it was gone. Had it been real?
I remembered the Bible story of Naaman's leprosy, which left him when he was willing to humbly obey the man of God. Had the leprosy been real? Can we call what is here today and gone tomorrow real? Obviously, much depends on our definition of the word "real." But when we read in the Bible, "They that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of nought," Isa. 41:12 . and the passage where Job was assured, "The dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought," Job 8:22 . does not all this point to God's presence as the one fundamental reality, and consequently to the basic unreality of evil?
Paul speaks of "imaginations"—sophistries—that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. See II Cor. 10:5 . The best and most effective way to take off error's masks is to let a deep understanding of God's omnipresence show up error's deceptiveness. Here the Christian Science textbook is a tremendous help. Above all, it's important to become aware of Spirit's nature. We find it undeniable that God, divine Spirit, is everywhere; omnipresence cannot be pushed out of the way. Obviously, then, it's essentially a belief in the reality of evil that would encroach upon this fact. But the clearer our concept of God, the weaker this belief becomes, until we succeed in driving the belief altogether from our consciousness—thus depriving it of any power.
Think of Jesus: could he have restored the withered hand to normal if he had accepted disease as God-created? Or even, should he have? Does not such a healing indicate his unconditional refusal to accept evil as God-given or real? That refusal enabled him to bring God's goodness and protection to the fore.
Similarly Christian Science does not call evil unreal to avoid the issue and close our eyes to tragic suffering. We call evil unreal and endeavor to discern its unreality in order to destroy evil's threats and so reveal the omnipresence of God's goodness and power, driving out hunger and suffering.
But we must be very careful never to use the word "unreal" loosely, because not only will this be misinterpreted, it may also hurt. To speak glibly of evil's unreality in the face of destruction, cruelty, sickness, and hunger, would be unkind, to say the least. But it is the healer's duty to acquire a deep knowledge of God and His universe in order to combat the beliefs of evil. We must become deeply acquainted with God as the ever-present divine reality. We read in Science and Health, "To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is." Science and Health, p. 275 .
Only by exposing evil's falsity can humanity be liberated from its apparently disastrous effects. The textbook makes clear the great importance of denouncing evil as a fake—so enabling us to prove God's dominion over it.
If we work this way consistently, enlarging the borders of demonstrated good in our own environment, the result must be an increasing withdrawal of evil's claim to reality. And this will hasten the day when we may share the Psalmist's triumphant song: "For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be." Ps. 37:10 .
