IN the Scriptural allegory in Genesis, Adam, the generic type of mortal man, is represented as sentenced by the Lord God to a career of toil and hardship because of his disobedience in tasting the fruit of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." In this story we find an intimation that evil has its origin in the recognition of a relative standard of existence. Adam is driven out of the garden and denied access to the tree of life for partaking of the fruit which he had been warned not to touch; or, to paraphrase the description, mortal man is said to have forfeited the consciousness of immortality, the experience of life as absolute, by compromising with a relative, material sense of truth, God and the universe. Metaphysically considered, evil is the complement of a relative conception of good. No logical origin, status, support, or foothold for evil can be found in absolute good, God and all that expresses Him.
The dissatisfaction and woe entailed by acknowledging a relative standard of life, embracing good and evil, hasten the recognition that this standard is false; that it is foisted upon mankind through a misconception of the truth; that absolute good is the only element of experience which is upheld by divine Principle. The blunder has its inception in the realm of abstract falsity; and the stupendous host of concrete deceptions and maladjustments which follow in the train of the initial faux pas can be arrested, defeated, and annihilated only as the error is traced back to its supposititious source, uncovered and corrected metaphysically by the truth. Then it can no longer pass current as authentic, real, or potential. As Christ Jesus so tersely expressed it, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
The great Teacher's illuminating example and the works he taught his followers to perform, show conclusively that this freedom, this exemption or immunity from wrong, extends to every province of human economy; that the depredations of evil within the range of the individual's experience diminish or cease to the extent that the right idea is apprehended and accepted as authoritative in the affections. The Wayshower's consummate mastery of the aggressive forms of evil, as he explained again and again to his disciples, was due to the fact that he cut off the base of error's operations by interdicting its bogus claims as its arguments presented themselves in his own consciousness. The affirmation that evil has no starting-point or abiding-place outside of a false material sense, is sustained whenever a realizing consciousness that existence is solely the manifestation of absolute good causes phenomena or symptoms of evil to disappear. Such demonstration goes to show that material sense is not a God-created entity, is not the emanation or offspring of Mind, but contrariwise is a state of mindlessness, unenlightenment, a mental vacuum, so to speak, when considered from the standpoint of truth and intelligence.
