Christian Science is freeing the race from its belief in and fear of evil by making plain the truth that evil is never actual but always suppositional. The existence of any fact renders impossible the actual existence of anything which denies or opposes that fact. "God, good, being ever present," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 72 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "it follows in divine logic that evil, the suppositional opposite of good, is never present;"
The knowledge of any fact precludes the entertainment in thought of an opposing falsehood as if it were a fact. The mathematician cannot believe false suppositions which contradict the truths he understands. Because God is the all-knowing divine Mind, to Him there can be no realm of supposition or belief. The so-called human mind, however, because of its ignorance, is prone to conjecture, to make suppositions, and then promptly to forget that these suppositions are not ascertained facts. This tendency of the human mind is illustrated by a well-known incident in the life of a great statesman. Wishing to enable a group of men to see that they were urging upon him a certain course of action only because they were reasoning from false assumptions, he begged leave to put an apparently irrelevant question, and then asked, "How many legs has a sheep?" "Four," some one answered. "Yes," said the statesman, "and now suppose we call his tail a leg,—then how many legs has he?" Instantly came the answer, "Five." "Why, no," said the statesman; "calling a sheep's tail a leg will never make it so, and the sheep has four legs as before."
When humanity no longer mistakes fiction for fact, its troubles will disappear, for they all come from this tendency of the human mind to form and fear false human concepts. For centuries the race dared not move about with perfect freedom on the earth, because it had conjectured that the earth was flat, and then naturally reasoned that it was possible to fall over the edge. Ignorant of the nature and character of God and reasoning from its own cruel standpoint, the human mind conjured up the picture of a God of wrath, and then trembled in the presence of its own misconception.
