If, at the approach or manifestation of evil, one knows with the absolute certainty of Science, which renders contradiction unthinkable, that God knows good only, healing is instantaneous. That this is true may be seen from the simple fact that to know God as the only good and all-good and good only, is to know man as made in His image. Healing is the unshakable certainty that God cannot know evil, and once this expression of Truth reigns as consciousness, no other proof is needed that man, God's reflection, cannot know evil, and therefore that what is unknown to both creator and creation can have no existence, substance, or power. "God is His own infinite Mind, and expresses all," states Mary Baker Eddy on page 310 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." The knowledge that this "all" contains no slightest hint of sin, disease, or death, is the healer of mankind.

That good is all there is to know is, however, a direct affront to sophistication, that favored offspring of the false consciousness or supposed mind of mankind. This so-called mind deals in and feeds upon both light and shade. It is the Adam-mind, conceiving knowledge to comprise both good and evil. It hastens to assure the beginner in Christian Science, even in the midst of his first proofs of the healing truth, that he cannot forswear all at once the pride and fancied protection of sophistication. Such a one is thus apt to cling to the secrets of material existence, its tricks and subterfuges, the accretions of erroneous belief for which he has paid so dearly in the past. He often feels that to abandon his hard won knowledge of good and evil, and to accept the statement that God knows only the one and not the other, will betray him into a strange, one-sided, and uncertain universe. Believing the knowledge of good and evil to constitute mind, he is inclined to doubt the omnipotence of a God who know good alone.

Yet, because the beginner may not at once be able to apply successfully an understanding that God knows good only, is no excuse for balking this fact or refusing to accept it or to grasp it as best he may. That God does not know evil is indeed easy to comprehend, if one but considers the simple analogy of mathematics. "Evil" in mathematics is represented by the blunder or mistake, either in the misapprehension of rules or of omission or commission in applying them. Only one who has mislearned the fundamentals of mathematics can assume any sort of knowledge of errors; certainly the accomplished mathematician knows them not, and the more proficient he is, the farther is he from knowing them. A hodge podge of correctness and blundering, of rules and their perversion, does not constitute mathematics. That two times two is seven is never true or real or substantial or powerful, no matter if the would-be good-and-evil mathematician substracts three from the product to make it so.

Mind knows good only. Truth embraces only that which is ever and eternally true. Divine Love is everywhere and All. That which is unlovely may have many things believed about it, but only one thing about it is true: that God does not know it and that it therefore does not exist. Against these simple statements the human mind rebels. The Adam-mind craves in its heavenly garden at least one forbidden tree, at least one possibility of something other than good. Give it this much, it declares, and it will rest content. This granted by the unwary thinker, the old tempter soon appears. Will the human mind allow this savory fruit of other than good to remain untasted? The answer is found on every page of human history.

No greater enemy is to be faced in all our journey toward Godlikeness than the belief that perfection must be flavored with just a dash of imperfection, that man can only approximate the true measure of God's man. This is, indeed, no less than the belief in death. "Drink and be merry," or, "Live and be fruitful," death adjures, "if to-morrow you will agree to die!" "Turn over a new leaf, and welcome, but keep your finger on the page, lest you lose mortal mind's inalienable right to turn back again if it chooses!" "Be kind and generous outwardly; there is no need yet to blot out the salacious thought within!" "This trifling lust for comfort, or luxury, or adulation, or human power ... what does it matter in view of your advanced thought and devout understanding and demonstration in behalf of others?" Thus the arguments are presented; for, after all, all that the father of lies ever wants is to convince the thought that absolute perfection cannot quite be attained, and is not, indeed, to be desired, at least until "hereafter." Given the claim that man as God's image can know even ever so little of evil, and evil is content. Only the insistence that God knows good only, and that man knows good only, can defeat these attacks. On page 204 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy tells us that this is the common trait of all forms of error, that they support false conclusions of evil and good as coexistent; and on the following page she asks, "When will the error of believing that there is life in matter, and that sin, sickness, and death are creations of God, be unmasked?" Then a little farther on she supplies the answer: "When we fully understand our relation to the Divine, we can have no other Mind but His,—no other Love, wisdom, or Truth, no other sense of Life, and no consciousness of the existence of matter or error."