Article September 5, 1988 Issue

Does the devil live under your house?

Learning more of God's great goodness and love, we give up superstitious faith in evil.

Ruth G. McCleary

Some children told a four-year-old boy that the devil lived under his house. This frightened the child, and he told his mother. Despite her reassurances, his fear persisted. Then his mother realized that he would have to meet the world's assertions of evil throughout his life and that he needed a basic understanding of God in order to do that. She was grateful for her own Sunday School training, which had helped her many times to master evil by loving good. So she decided to send him to the Christian Science Sunday School.

The first Sunday, the child asked the teacher questions about the devil. The teacher spoke to him of God's love for His children and firmly told him that there is no devil, because everything God made is good and He made everything. After this first session in Sunday School the boy told his mother, "My teacher said there is no devil, and she knows more than those kids." He has continued in Sunday School and has already had many proofs of God's care and of his own ability to master evil. He is no longer afraid.

How important it is that we learn to speak with spiritual authority concerning truth and error. The Bible says of Christ Jesus, "He taught them as one having authority."^{Matt. 7:29.} And when Jesus spoke of the devil he said, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him."^{John 8:44.} Part of the definition of devil in the Glossary of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy is "Evil; a lie; error; neither corporeality nor mind; the opposite of Truth ...."^{Science and Health, p. 584.} If only we would accept the devil's unreality as readily as that four-year-old, we would recognize evil—or devilish—suggestions as impostors, see them as nothing, nowhere, and no one. Then we would resist them with authority!