A most helpful statement in combating and destroying sin and sickness is made by Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 71) where she says: "Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense."

The argument of sin or sickness always contradicts this. It says it is the very person of you or me, is amalgamated with us; that we enjoy sin, and suffer from sickness. Furthermore, it says that sickness is definitely placed in the head, heart, stomach, lungs, glands, limbs, eyes, ears, or somewhere else. Then it says it certainly is some thing, for it has a name which gives it prestige and helps mortals to discuss and appraise its afflictive qualities.

Mrs. Eddy saw clearly why evil "is neither person, place, nor thing," and she wished to help you and me to see this. Her discovery of the Science of Christianity, which based all the works of Christ Jesus, brings to light that man is not a physical body. The real man, she realized, is not material and temporary, but wholly spiritual; that is, of the permanent substance of Mind, the individual idea of Mind, living for the rational purpose of evidencing this Mind in thought, word, and act.

This concept of man may seem dim with abstractness to the falsely educated mortal, taught to think of man as localized in a three-dimensional bulk of unthinking cells and organs. Mrs. Eddy, however, saw that the spiritual was the only concept of man supported by the teachings of the Bible, by divine logic and revelation. The tangibility of spiritual man, and the naturalness of his status as the idea of Mind, unhampered by material limitations, become increasingly recognized as the negative nature of matter is found through increased understanding of the allness of intelligence, or Mind.

Reasoning from the simple basis of God as perfect Mind, expressed in and by a universe of ideas, we find no evil present. All identity, or true individuality, all place, and all things are expressive of God, good. Nothing has identity but what reflects God. All being is His being. All identity is the identification of this being. God really is the only Person, the one presence. His works alone have place, and nothing is apart from Him and His. Nothing is, but the something and everything of His making.

Evil's case falls when put under the microscope of Truth. The basic error, mortal mind, cannot produce a real effect, called a mortal person, as a place where its sin and sickness, called this or that, can root and develop. This fact is of great practical use to you and me. If we find some sinful desire, tendency, or habit, or some form of sickness claiming it has affixed itself to our person, these scientific truths show us that we can disengage our sense of selfhood from any such claim. How? By declaring and realizing that we have, in Science, no mortal personality or embodiment for evil to work in. God makes no such identity as a place in which error can abide or be active, and evil, however named or classified, is still evil, and never nearer Truth and reality than the basic error it evidences. It cannot identify itself as the being of any person, assign to itself a particular place in man, or build itself up by attaching some Adamic name to itself.

These denials are justified because of the spiritual facts revealed in Science. Man is God's idea, His son. Can the son, or expression, of Supreme Being be a garden spot for godless evil, either sin or disease? Does the positive, all-wise Mind permit its manifestation to become the sinful agent for, or afflicted victim of, evil? No, evil is not any person, has no place, and is no thing. Evil is just evil, with nothing to identify it, no place for it to reside, no name to dignify it. By no claim or pretense can it lift itself out of its pit of futile falsity. Never can it contact, possess, control, or afflict God's idea, which is the only true identity of you and me. Nor can it substitute its distorted concept of man as a sinning, or sickening, mortal for the true concept, which God is eternally constituting and preserving, safe and secure in His allness.

Our work is, through a spiritualized sense of God, the universe, and man, to gain the courage wherewith to refute what negative matter and its supporting witnesses, called the material senses, argue that we are, and to affirm with conviction, born of spiritual understanding, the spiritual fact as to ourselves. Paul thought deeply of these things, and concluded that "whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord" (II Cor. 5:6), following with the assertion that he was "willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord."

Students of the Science of spiritual Life are finding reality by dematerializing their sense of identity, lessening their belief in material molecules as the substance of man, through realizing that only Mind and its thoughts are his substance, for his being is eternally devoted to glorifying and expressing the Life that is God, good. Here is the only identity of being. Seeing this, the falsity of evil's claim to be person, to have place, or to be some thing is, in a measure, realized and an important forward step taken on the road Truthward.

Paul Stark Seeley