Does God, good, send evil?
Under the marginal heading "Perfection of divine government" in Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy we find these words: "Christian Science goes to the bottom of mental action, and reveals the theodicy which indicates the rightness of all divine action, as the emanation of divine Mind, and the consequent wrongness of the opposite so-called action,—evil, occultism, necromancy, mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism."Science and Health, p. 104
This is the only occasion Mrs. Eddy uses the word "theodicy" (from the Greek words, theos and dike—"God" and "justice"). It is a term originated by the philosopher Leibnitz, vindicating the "justice of God" in permitting natural and moral evil to be visited upon men. He endeavored to prove that the world, as it is, is the best possible world, and that the existence of evil is a necessary condition of the existence of the greatest moral good.
