THE trend of popular thought for many years has been toward scientific methods, and some teachers of physical science have admitted that sooner or later these methods must also be applied to religion. They, however, have failed to see that in the study of spiritual Science evil cannot be admitted as a factor, since God, the Principle of being, the only cause and creator, is good and good alone: hence evil is no part of His infinite manifestation. Christian Science does not admit that evil has any place, even under present human conditions, except as a false belief to be guarded against and eliminated from human consciousness by the understanding of what constitutes reality. It is easy to see that neither sin nor disease is an entity or any part of man's being, since the removal of both would not take one iota from mind or body, but would leave manhood intact, with limitless opportunities for expansion and growth.
Christ Jesus did not hesitate to strike at evil under whatever guise it appeared, and his work was not to "destroy" but to "fulfil;" and the work of the Christian Scientist, following in the same line, is to overcome all evil by knowing that it has no foundation in fact or reality. The long and almost fruitless struggles of the centuries surely offer convincing evidence that the beliefs held respecting evil, and the methods pursued in combating it, have had a wrong basis. Christian belief has seemingly been helpless because of its acceptance of the power of evil and the reality of matter and its supposed laws. It has practically denied that man is now a spiritual being, governed by spiritual law; nay, its representatives have even attempted to punish those who have stood for this great truth as announced in Christian Science. Scholastic theology has contended that man is now material, having material desires and tendencies, but with a possible chance of reaching spiritual being after death. This erroneous teaching accepted as truth, the "works of the flesh," mentioned by St. Paul in his epistle to the Galatians, inevitably follow,—the hatred, variance, drunkenness, revelings, murders, adulteries, etc.,—not one of which has any relation to the spiritual man who is "born of God."
It is for this spiritual man that Mrs. Eddy has contended, first, last, and always; and for the right of all men to health, holiness, and happiness, under spiritual law. She stands firmly by the teaching of the Bible, that the spiritual man can be neither sick nor sinful, nor is he subject to death, for, says Paul, "He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." This is strictly in line with the words of Christ Jesus, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death." This statement of the Master was so entirely at variance with the established beliefs of the day that his critics said after he had so spoken, "Now we know that thou hast a devil;" and if materiality with all its illusions were of God, these critics would have had some reason for this envenomed thrust.
