The paradox of a perfect God and a seemingly imperfect creation has always been a stumblingblock to theologians, but Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science cut the Gordian knot by furnishing proof that imperfection, error, evil, exists only as a false claim, a suppositional lie or negation of the truth, and therefore that it does not in any sense belong to the divine creation.
Fathered and supported by this lie, the drama of mortal existence goes on, in belief, through different stages of self-deception, wherein the illusion is so complete and convincing as to disarm suspicion until the mesmeric spell is broken by the revelation of spiritual reality. In the third chapter of Genesis, Satan, the suppositional adversary, is represented as first appearing on the scene in the guise of a serpent, with a cunningly devised plot to corrupt thought and confuse issues by reasoning from false premises. The points brought out in this allegory illustrate the steps by which evil, professing the attributes of good, seeks to be accounted true and real. The fact that the adversary is a suppositional character, and not a veritable person or real agent, does not affect the question in its practical bearings. An erroneous argument calls for the same kind of treatment whether it claims an individual as sponsor or whether its appeal is made through inarticulate channels.
The most mischievous foe is not the one who fights squarely in the open, but the one whose designs are concealed by pretense and subterfuge—the wolf in sheep's clothing has the greater power to harm mortals. Because mortal thought at best is entangled in a web of ignorance and self-deception, something more than a general affirmation of the truth of being is requisite to dispel the illusion of error; the many-sided forms of belief must be taken up point by point as they come to the surface, and be tried before the judgment seat of spiritual understanding.
