Christlike Simplicity

ALFRED MARSHALL VAUGHN

Paul , in his second letter to the Corinthians, said, "I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."

There is a tendency to let error deceive us into thinking that it is real, and that we should work against it as if it were something actual. Also, there is the tendency to let mortal mind deceive us into thinking that error has so many ramifications that we should be constantly handling each one of its various beliefs. Believing this, some are kept so busy that they hardly have any time to dwell upon the fact of God's allness, His love and care, the perfection of man, and the beauty and wonder of the spiritual universe.

Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 472), "Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter." Error can never be anything but supposition. It can never have any reality. "If God, or good, is real, then evil, the unlikeness of God, is unreal. And evil can only seem to be real by giving reality to the unreal," our beloved Leader writes (ibid., p. 470). We shall not give reality to error, or make it out to be something, if we keep before us the fact that it is only a supposition, and that even a glimpse of Truth prevents us from being deceived by this supposition.

Fear, belief in loss, sickness, sin, and death are based upon the supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter; and as we see the falsity of this supposition we remove the foundation of discord. How absurd it is to believe in sensation where there is no sensation; to believe that life is where there is no life, that substance is in nothingness! As we unmask error in this way, we see how powerless it is.

Suppose evil would have us accept some fearful-sounding name for a discordant condition which we are setting out to heal for ourselves, or for another. If we consider it from this false standpoint we may seem to have something big to handle. But if we recognize it as only an illusion based upon the supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter, how different is the situation, and how much easier it is to unsee the discord!

A little girl who was a member of a Christian Science Sunday School was playing with some other children. She picked certain flowers, and the other children said: "Don't pick them. They will give you hay fever." The little girl replied, "There is no such thing." What she had been taught about God and man helped her to know that what they were saying was not true; and so she refuted the error, according to her understanding. Giving error no nature or identity, we can handle it from the standpoint that it is only false belief arguing from the basis that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter. Then it is easy for us to see the claim of evil or error as nothing. Mrs. Eddy states (ibid., p. 480), "If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear."

A small boy who had injured himself while playing, in a few minutes started to play again. When his mother remonstrated, the child ingenuously said: "God is. Error isn't. And that's that." And his perfect faith—his simple trust in God's allness and error's consequent nothingness—completed the healing. When we hear of incidents like this we understand better what the great Master meant when he said, "Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

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