The Christian Scientist is sometimes confronted with the argument that inasmuch as God and His spiritual creation are the only realities of being, there is no occasion for giving special consideration to error's alleged secret methods of working, no necessity for taking up in detail the means by which the baseless falsity of mortal mind purports to advance itself. It is speciously argued that the ground is covered in refuting with the truth such manifestations of false belief as challenge attention in the due course of events; in short, that it is ill-advised to "make so much of animal magnetism."
If the claim of error extended no farther than the specific phases of inharmony which appear at present on the surface of human experience, and if the tap-root of erroneous belief could be exterminated piecemeal, as it were, by banishing those disturbing factors, the upshot of the process would be the total extinction of the claim of error. But progressive exercise in applying the truth of being as revealed in Christian Science, uncovers at each turn latent and unsuspected forms of the belief of power and intelligence opposed to God. This is not to be wondered at, for as a false claim, the suppositional antithesis of truth, the negation of all that truth affirms, error must be reckoned as coextensive with truth, even as in mathematics every positive or real quantity has its corresponding minus. Mrs. Eddy says: "Sin existed as a false claim before the human concept of sin was formed; hence one's concept of error is not the whole of error. The human thought does not constitute sin, but vice versa, sin constitutes the human or physical concept" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 67).
Only by disguising its actual character and simulating the good and spiritual, does the material lie stand a chance of being accounted genuine, powerful, intelligent. Hence, in belief, the artifices and maneuvers of error in the name of good seem to keep pace with the unfolding of the spiritual idea in human consciousness, and the serpent follows close upon the trail of the woman. Verily, it was no superficial fancy that led the ancient writer to choose as the symbol of error the creature which was "more subtle than any beast of the field." Since the resources of Spirit are infinite, error feigns equal resourcefulness; since God is intelligence, error, to give a plausible account of itself, must affect intelligent ways; since God is all-power, error must assume to be equally powerful; since God's government of the universe is characterized by law and order, error must present the semblance of lawfulness and orderliness,—and so on through all the categories, in order to qualify as the suppositional opposite of truth, error must pattern after the model of the true creation; method must be exhibited even in its madness.
