The teaching of the nothingness of evil in Christian Science is sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated; and descriptions of evil and its seeming operations, if unaccompanied by the demonstration of its unreality, only tend to confuse the more.
God is All-power; and evil, being the admitted opposite of God, must be powerless. God is Truth; and evil, being the admitted opposite of God, must be a lie. God is omnipresent; and evil, being the admitted opposite of God, must be absent. Evil is only illusion putting forth a false claim to existence; hence, the knowledge of evil that one must have in order to destroy it is a knowledge of its nothingness; for this is all one can ever really know of it.
Thus we see that it is not Christian Science which makes evil unreal. Evil is unreal to begin with; and Christian Science simply awakens us to this fact. Mortal man is in bondage to false belief. This was proved by the experiment of the Oxford boys who caused a criminal to die by allowing some warm water to trickle over his arm, because he, thinking he was bleeding to death, fulfilled his own belief. Had a Christian Scientist been called in he would, have awakened him from his self-imposed illusion. He who thinks he lives in matter has no more basis for his belief than the one who thought he was bleeding to death. Each, in bondage to false belief about man accepts it as fact. For one to say, however, there is no evil and then pursue sinful habits and ways of material thinking is not to realize evil's unreality, but to allow that its seeming existence is real,—to be asleep to its unreality. To be awake to evil's unreality helps to make manifest, here and now, good as all and omnipresent.
