IT would seem quite impossible for an intelligent person, free to do his own thinking, to rest content in believing that an infinitely wise, infinitely good and omnipotent God either created or permitted a rival power to set up a reign of evil within His kingdom of infinite good. So illogical is this theory of two rival kingdoms, sovereignty within sovereignty, that human ingenuity has been exceedingly busy trying to devise some plausible explanation which should not conflict either with the omnipotence and all-presence of God, who is infinite good, or with the cherished beliefs of mortals in the reality of evil.
The attempt to reconcile these irreconcilable and directly contradictory manifestations of good and evil in a God-created universe has been a conspicuous failure. Yet men and women of intelligence have gone on trying to make themselves believe that they believe that evil is as real as good. It remained for Christian Science to open the way to a rational, reasonable, and demonstrable understanding of the actual, rather than speculative and fictitious, all-presence and omnipotence of God and of good, rejecting the idea of the presence of evil as a reality, or as an essential part of a God-created and God-governed world.
Christian Science teaches that under divine government we live in good, and only in good. Evil has no place in that government. Under God's law and under the dominion of the true or spiritual consciousness, there can be no channel or channels, personal or impersonal, voluntary or involuntary, willful or ignorant, through or by means of which evil can manifest itself. But the Christian Scientist realizes the necessity of daily guarding his consciousness from the opposite and world-wide belief in the power of evil successfully to defy the working out of good along the line of divine Principle. In the proportion that he abides in the truth, he keeps evil out of consciousness, and consequently out of experience. He guards his thought against the poison of hatred, malice, envy, revenge, deceit, dishonesty, prejudice, hypocrisy, and the self-mesmerisms of ignorance, conceit, bigotry, false judgment, self-righteousness, as well as against the incursions of self-will, self-justification, paralyzing and useless self-condemnation, and discouragement. He refuses to be confused and blinded by the false claim of the power of evil to baffle good.
