"Oh! who shall deliver us from shams, from fraud and error, and all evil, and reveal us their opposites,—sincerity, truth and love, and all good? How we would choose the better part, and pursue it with all our might!" Thus we all say, and so feel, in our better moods. But we feel that clouds and darkness are round about the "excellent glory" which we seek. May God, and all the good, inspire our present search.
The Real is the Good and the True. This has been a suggested thought of the ages; but it has never become a formulated dogma of Church or Council, because they did not see it clearly. Augustine refused to allow to error, evil and sin any proper reality. He affirmed that it was only the absence of good, or the effect of such absence. Many theologians, who have held to the "Augustinian doctrine of grace," have also held this notion. They make all evil and sin to be only the absence, or effect of the absence, of the divine power and grace; and they are happy in the thought that by this means they give all glory of all good to God.
So far this accords with Christian Science; as this relates, like Augustine, good and evil, truth and error, to each other as light to darkness, which is nothing but the absence of light. In this sense, we say that sin, and error, and all evil, are nothing, and should be treated as nothing.
