A CHILD awakening during the night saw the bright moon shining through the window, and on the floor the moving shadow of a rocking chair. Becoming frightened, he began to cry; others were awakened, and the child was quickly told that there was nothing to be afraid of, as it was only a shadow that moved . But this did not reassure him. As he did not know what "shadow" meant, the explanation only seemed to add to the fear; and he exclaimed: "The shadow will get me! The shadow will get me!" Later, on coming into Christian Science, he was often reminded of the analogy between this experience and the fears that beset our human footsteps day by day. Even when we have been told that they were only shadows, have we not sometimes continued to stand in awe of them, believing them to be at least partly real?
Most of our human troubles, cares, and worries spring from beliefs that do not exist, from images of our own fears. The evil or error that seems to be a fact is readily corrected and destroyed by the truth, when the latter is properly applied. It is the sense of error we allow ourselves to entertain, consciously or unconsciously, that affects us. Evil has no power to harm us or to touch us at all, apart from our own belief in it; for our real selfhood is in God, and therefore is beyond the reach of supposititious error.
All that can claim to make us afraid are the false concepts we entertain, the erroneous pictures we allow to flit through consciousness. If these be not entertained, we cannot be affected. Evil is always illusion, an unreal image of human thought— never in God or in anything that He has made. When we discover that the thing we believe is menacing us does not exist, but is merely the supposititious result of false belief, we are instantaneously freed. When the evil belief that has appeared to be a fact is shut out of thought, we do not suffer from it any longer; and we find that when we persist in keeping evil belief out of thought, holding to God, good, and to Him alone, as real, this process effectually destroys all belief in evil. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 400), "By lifting thought above error, or disease, and contending persistently for truth, you destroy error." The only entity that evil has to us is that which we give it in our thought. When it is given no place there, it no longer can even seem to us to have entity or reality.
