As one follows, through history and mythology, the changing vagaries of the human mind down to the present day, one cannot fail to be impressed with the striking similarity of its repeated experiences. The same blindness, the same inability to learn from experience, the same tendency to form vain images from which it subsequently must flee in terror, characterize all its history. Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 186), "If mortal mind knew how to be better, it would be better;" but being in reality only ignorance, or the absence of Mind, it can neither be better nor learn better; it must indeed be "put off," replaced by divine Mind, the infinite intelligence, before peace and healing can come to a long-suffering world.
This replacement is, of course, a gradual process, but as, little by little, intelligence takes the place of non-intelligence, and fear gives way to love in the individual consciousness, the positive nature of good begins to be recognized, and slowly but surely the sense of evil in the world is seen to lessen. It is at most but a sense of evil, a negative quality, which must disappear before the omnipresence of good as does darkness before the sunlight.
Being by its very nature nonintelligent, it is not surprising that the human mind, so called, is eternally being fooled. From the beginning of time it has mistaken evil for good and ignored the real and substantial while clinging to the unsubstantial. To such a sense of things Spirit is necessarily evanescent, misty nothingness, entirely intangible and vague, and spirituality cannot therefore appear to be particularly desirable. The idea of spiritual man as real and substantial yet without a single quality of discord or decay is wholly incomprehensible to it.
Until Mrs. Eddy summed up the result of her practical experience in the words: "Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal" (Science and Health, p. 468) matter was generally accepted as the only tangible and real proof of the substantiality of the universe. Jesus' proofs of spiritual substance were forgotten or called supernatural, and concreteness meant to the world matter. To the human mind its own concepts, contradictory and unreasonable as they often were, represented still its only realities, and it accordingly gave to them its name for reality,—matter.
Frequently, having outlined its own dreams, it began to believe them powerful, and love or fear them as the occasion demanded. Like children who tell ghost stories in the twilight and then shrink from the creations of their own fancy, the ancient peoples imagined their gods and goddesses, outlined them, and then trembled before them; but their images of stone that resulted from this tendency to outline were no more material than the modern concept of man as a mortal, sinning, suffering creature. The charms and spells of the old fairy stories are apt illustrations of the illusions to which the human mind is constantly subject.
In the old tales a magical charm or enchantment is placed upon a mighty prince and he becomes weak and helpless; through the spell visited upon it by some wicked witch a whole court is put to sleep and dreams for a hundred years; or a beautiful child, for the ugly thoughts that he manifests, is changed to the likeness of a toad or an adder until such time as he learns to express love. The charms of weakness, disease, and deformity visited upon its own concept of man by the human mind are no more real nor powerful than those of the fairy tales, and we can here and now rouse ourselves from the lethargic sleep to which we seem to have fallen victim, a spell never imposed by divine authority.
As the new concept of man dawns on us in Christian Science, through our individual effort to reflect the Christ-mind, we realize that ridding the world of its sense of evil is an individual responsibility. Evil without a consciousness through which to express itself becomes a nonentity. It is like a mistake which no one longer believes; it disappears. Evil as an abstraction,—in the air, as it were,— unattached to any personality, thing, or circumstance, does not trouble us greatly. Influenza as a supposition, unexpressed through the human mind's belief, matter, would mean nothing to us; but attached to a person or a community, it may fill those ignorant of the truth with terror. War as an interesting supposititious state might evoke philosophical discussion; but war expressed through persons and nations seems a terrible and unescapable reality. If, then, evil is dependent upon matter for expression, with the putting off of the human mind, to which alone matter seems real, must not evil lose all claim to entity?
Great as the burden of evil may seem in the world to-day, we have made a start in the right direction. From the days when Abraham talked with God, and Moses set up the tablets of the law, we have been taught that it is possible to resist evil when it comes to us as sin. For ages the children of the race have been taught that it lies with them whether or not murder, theft, adultery, covetousness, or violence shall find expression through them. Jesus' ministry extended the forms of evil to which we might forbid entrance to include disease and death; and Mrs. Eddy has reawakened us to this power with her clarion call to "stand porter at the door of thought" (Science and Health, p. 392). Who can tell how much the world's burden of evil has been already lightened by those words and the comforting assurance that follows in the next paragraph: "Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man." The task seems difficult only because mortal man allows himself to be fooled. Fortunately, however, supposed mortal man is not the true man. The true likeness of God is here and now, through alert right activity, forever protected from any supposition of evil. Evil is always the same old lie, and no disguise can make it a whit more real or powerful.
One is reminded of the myth concerning the old man of the sea, Nereus, to whom Hercules was forced to go in the course of one of his labors. He was warned that Nereus had power to change his form at will, but that if he seized him and hung on, undaunted, the creature would at last be compelled to resume his original shape and so be overcome. Accordingly the hero remained unmoved though serpents, fire, and roaring beasts appeared beneath his hands, and as a result he conquered. How often we hear one say, "I can meet financial problems easily, but a physical trouble is quite another matter." Yet is it not the same old lie in a new form? Disguises designed to terrify us cannot in any way succeed, for one and all they are mere illusions of the hypothetical human mind, without any actuality. Can evil hide in God's idea? Can disease or sin for a moment touch that which is eternally the expression of God? Man is forever intact, literally untouched by the dream images of the human mind. Entirely to detach evil from our concept of man is the only way to bring to light the true man that Christian Science reveals, and this can be accomplished only as we recognize the ever presence of good which demonstrates the mythical nature of evil in all its varying forms. There is no seeming condition whatever too serious to be instantly and forever replaced with the understanding of Principle, which is all that ever has been real.
Are we doing our part? Every time we refuse evil expression through us, we reduce the sum total of evil's claim to reality. We are helping not only ourselves but the whole world. All there is to a ghost disappears from the world when all people cease to believe in ghosts. So it is with the whole of evil; as we practically comprehend Christ Jesus' words and see evil for what it is,—a lie and the father of lies,—it will pass with all its train into the land of mythology.
