Good

The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. Ps. 146th 9.  

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Gen. 1st 31.

The word good, as used in these scriptural passages, is in the predicate adjective sense. Christian Science uses it in an enlarged sense, giving it the old Saxon signification, God. Good, therefore, is one of the Christian Science synonyms of God.

If God is Good, it would seem to follow as a necessary sequence that His creation is good. If we are to rely solely upon the reason and logic of this statement, we should have no difficulty in drawing our conclusion that all is Good; because it is impossible to think of the creation of Good as being other than Good. While we can conceive of a creator who can create that which is less than himself, we cannot conceive of a creator who can create that which is wholly unlike, or which is the opposite of himself. Creation, strictly speaking, can only be reflection. As an illustration,—A builder can build a house; but it is only his reflected thought; his thought externalized in the shape and form of a house. In one sense he might be said to be its creator, but it had never taken the shape and form of a house, without the intelligence back of it. This intelligence, therefore, is, in this limited sense, a creative intelligence. But is the reflection of this intelligence, i.e., the house, a something greater than the thought which created it? Is it co-existent with that thought? Has the house greater power, has it as great power, as the intelligence which produced it? A moment’s thought must show us that the reflection is less than the reflector. Yet the house, though less than the mind of the builder, is in its sphere good. It, however, is a reflected good, rather than in any true sense a created good. Its form and shape are all that the builder can be said to have created. The materials out of which it was built, were something pre-existent, and brought into use and application by the builder in its formation.

When we speak of God as being the framer and architect of the universe, do we mean that God actually created the universe, or that the universe has been reflected by Him, by the putting together in cohesive form those pre-existing elements which compose it? The latter is confessedly the method of so-called material creation. Then, in this sense, when the external form of the universe disappears, or is dissolved, it simply means a separation of the elements, out of which the universe was formed. These elements, material philosophers have only guessed at, and speculated about. What they are, or whence derived, or where they existed previous to their application to the purpose named, they do not pretend to know. Whether material or spiritual they are not able to say. We claim that the material universe was created in the same sense only, in which the house was created by the builder. And, in the true sense, both are reflections rather than creations. The one is no more real than the other, because the house, in its form as a house, is not eternal; and the material universe, in its form as a material universe, is not eternal. So that when we have determined what the creation of the material universe is, we have no more determined what original and primary creation is, than we have solved the problem of the creation of the house by the builder. We cannot say that there has been creation in either case. The only analysis we can make is that these phenomena are reflected to our sense perception. They are then not creations, because that term implies an original making, and not a mere formation, or putting together.

Good, then, is a reflected rather than a created something; for Good is without beginning, in the same sense that God is without beginning. Good is an all-existent Principle, and as such it can be reflected, but not created. That which is without beginning and without end never was created. A self-existent Principle is no more the subject of creation, than is Eternity the subject of creation. The term, therefore, must be understood in its relative sense, as many other terms used in connection with metaphysical or spiritual subjects must be understood. Good is Infinite, and the Infinite has no beginning.

See Science and Health page 432-3.

Christian Science maintains that all is Good, and there is no Evil. As a matter of absolute Truth this must be so. Yet if we trust our material senses, we must believe with our materialistic friends that Evil is a vastly greater power in the world than Good. We must, in order to solve this problem, look away from the understanding of our personal senses, and endeavor to spiritually discern the qualities and characteristics of Good.

When Jesus healed the blind beggar at the gate of the temple, he found that he had been blind from his birth. He opened his eyes, that he might see. Thus he found all mankind blind from their birth. Blind in material sense; blind by reason of their departure from Good, or from the truth and fact of Spirit; blind in that they had drifted away from their original condition, which was spiritual. And his mission was to remove their blindness, and open their spiritual perception to a reception and understanding of the things of God.

That evil is of human origin and human construction, and not divine, there can be no question. Otherwise, why the repeated exhortations of the Scriptures to men to turn from their evil ways? Why the constant urging of Jesus upon men to cease their sinning and wickedness? The whole teaching of Jesus, and the preaching of the gospel, is to turn men to righteousness and away from evil; in other words, to the spiritual, and away from the material. If God is the author of evil, why is this so? Is he trying to undo what he formerly did? Is he trying to annul laws of his own making? Is he trying to repeal his own statutes? Did he regret having made the law of evil, that he sent his only begotten Son to show men the way out of it? Oh, what an inconsistent, vacillating being mortal mind would have God to be! Making a rule to-day which he must abrogate to-morrow; creating Good, and afterwards creating Evil as a means of counter-acting the Good; placing Evil in the world as an entity, and then telling man if he falls into the trap thus set for him he shall be forever damned. Is it not about time men were taking upon themselves the responsibility of their own wickedness, instead of trying to shoulder the whole burden on God? Must God be charged with the wilful and perverse acts of man? The Scriptures tell us that “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Men, claiming to be servants of God, in their flounderings after the origin of evil, were obliged, themselves, to create a devil as a counter-actor to God, and set him up to pull down the temple of God’s construction. Why did it not occur to them to look into themselves for their devil? There is where they would have found him. There is where we find him to-day. The only devil extant in the world to-day, or that ever has been, is the devil of mortal-mind, of human thought and human construction. When we have destroyed the devil in ourselves, we have done much toward destroying his influence in the world. When each, for himself, has wrestled with him to his destruction, we have relieved God of the responsibility of our sins, and placed it where it belongs. These sins were the devils which Jesus exorcised. The devils within human consciousness; the evil thoughts of human construction. Then, to our understanding, the devil is but the synonym of evil, as Good is a synonym of God.

God never made evil. Mankind made it,—that is, he conjured it up out of the depths of his own imaginings and gave it the character of reality, because to his corrupted vision it had the semblance of reality. As everything of human construction is temporal, and subject to change, discord and decay, so evil, not being of or from God, must go the way of all flesh, to be finally swallowed up by the maw of its own nothingness. It rests with us, not with God, to say how quickly the swallowing process shall commence, and how rapidly it shall progress in our consciousness. God made only the law of Good, that law he has reflected in us, and will reflect in us just in the degree in which we will open the door of our consciousness to its reception. If we open it, the Good, which is Life, Truth, Love will pour in as inevitably as will the sunlight reflect itself through the open door and window of our house. It rests with us, and us only, to say in what degree it shall radiate and glorify ourselves. Not only did God provide the way, but in the plenitude of his Infinite Love, he sent his Son, Jesus the Christ, to show us that way. And for the purpose of breaking through the thick, unyielding crust of material sense, Jesus drove out devils, healed the sick, raised the dead, preached the gospel of Love and peace on earth, and suffered himself to be crucified and buried; and knowing that his teachings, and demonstrations, and performing of miracles, so-called, would fall almost unheeded upon the dull and perverse senses of mankind, he burst asunder the encasements of the sepulchre, and the trammels of the grave, and reappeared, to his disciples, thus demonstrating the absolute powerlessness of evil, hence its unreality. Oh what boundless Love, what transcendent Good was thus manifested! what rich treasures are laid away for us in the great store-house of the Infinite, if we will but reach forth our hands and receive them! In the presence of this radiating, and palpitating Good, is it not sacrilege to say that God is the Author of evil? Good does not reflect evil. All the evil there is, has been and is reflected by human sense to human sense. See Science and Health 120:1-20.

This glowing language ought to be, and is, a sufficient answer to every perplexed inquiry concerning Good and evil, and the creation thereof.

“All things are created spiritually.” The echoing and re-echoing of those words shall bring the risen Christ into the throbbing consciousness of an awakened and redeemed world. The Eternal verities will send back the resounding echo: “God is Good. He made all that was made, ‘and without him was not anything made that was made, and behold it was very Good.”

Milton had not caught this conception when in his “Paradise Lost” he sang:

But Lowell had, when, in his Prometheus, he sang:

Milton sang in the Sixteenth Century. Lowell sang in the Nineteenth Century.

As we destroy, to our consciousness, the power of evil, so do we destroy the power of sickness. We are told that while God sends sickness, he at the same time has put it into the minds of men to relieve and cure it by means of material remedies. Thus he makes one law to accomplish a given end, and another law to defeat that end. What see-sawing is this? But it is the see-sawing of mortal man, not of God. Is it not about time we were throwing away such childish and ridiculous conceptions of God, and coming like men, to assume the responsibility which belongs to us? Have we not played the coward long enough?

As Good is reflected in us, so let us be the instruments of reflecting it to, and for the benefit of, others.  That is our work. That is what Christian Science is teaching us to do.