MRS. EDDY says, "Simply count your enemy to be that which defiles, defaces, and dethrones the Christ-image that you should reflect" (Miscellaneous Writings, p.8), while St. Paul tells us that "the carnal mind is enmity against God." These are entirely impersonal statements of what the enemy is, not who it is, neither referring nor attaching it to mankind, showing that man is not an enemy and an enemy is not man.
Knowing that what appears as a personal enemy is not the person at all, but simply the enmity, the carnal mind seeking a channel through which to assert a false, supposititious self, one is at that moment given an opportunity to reverse the error, replace it with the idea of God, and make a friend. The only service that any error can render is to present itself uncovered, thereby giving one the opportunity to effect through the power of Truth its destruction.
When a sense of evil appears to be a person, to recognize this as only a condition of thought, as nothing but enmity to the truth, makes it possible to annihilate one's belief in that much evil. No matter how strong the evidence, it is only the one evil clamoring for recognition as person and place, and quickly to impersonalize it, brings at once a great change in one's sense of it. It is impossible for it to be both impersonal and personal, impossible to have two concepts of it at the same time, and one cannot let it pass as person after he knows it is nothing but a phase of fictitious evil. Even assuming that evil could have embodiment, one could not let such an embodiment pass as man, in the face of his understanding of what God is and man as His idea.
