STRANGE as it may seem, Christian people in their thought have always given more or less power to evil. No matter how firmly they may have declared themselves to believe God to be omnipotent, yet their fear of evil has deprived them of man's God-given dominion over error. This dominion Christian Science reinstates today, and so proves to us how true are these words of our Master: "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." The Master demonstrated the truth of these words, and taught his students how spiritual power would enable them to overcome the serpentine tendencies of the carnal mind. None knew so well as he the subtle nature of evil, and that only spiritual power could enable him to uncover and destroy it.
Through this same power Mrs. Eddy unmasked evil for our age, and though she tells us that the "metaphysical mystery of error" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 223) at first defied her, yet in Science and Health she summarizes evil in terms which undo its mysteries for all time. In adopting the term animal magnetism as the specific designation for all evil, Mrs. Eddy gives a new meaning to old words. This term, upon first thought, may arouse a sense of mystery, yet it is a phrase that draws from under cover the hidden nature of error as perhaps no other two words could do. The word animal covers the whole range of mortal thought, and the word magnetism designates its nature. Since animal is that which has to do with fleshly belief, and magnetism that which attracts or influences, we see that whatever obsesses mortal thought with materiality is both animal and magnetic. Animal magnetism stands for all the wilfulness of the carnal mind; for anger, fear, sin, disease, and death; for all that makes for misunderstandings and injustice in political, social, and individual experience; yet because this term is so comprehensive, so simple and definite, a right understanding of it removes both fear of evil and belief in it.
When we learn through the study of Christian Science that it is belief in evil which is both the evil and its asserted power, we have solved for ourselves the supposed mystery of evil and found a sure way to gain dominion over it. From the standpoint that belief is an assent to a proposition, or the acceptance of an assertion as real or true without positive knowledge or absolute certainty (see Webster's dictionary), evil as a belief has no positive knowledge to sustain it. Shorn of the ignorance and mystery that enshroud its erroneous suppositions with the darkness of fear, has evil anything left with which to secure belief in it? Surely it is not strange that the uncovering of error should destroy our belief in evil, and it is from this belief, and never from the reality of evil, that we need to be saved.
