MARY BAKER EDDY, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 17), "A lie has only one chance of successful deception,—to be accounted true." In these few words our Leader expresses a fact which is emphasized and amplified throughout her writings, and which shows the necessity of attaining and maintaining the true spiritual consciousness, which is impervious to error and cannot cognize it even as a claim.
The very first step in the line of spiritual progress is to acknowledge the all-power and ever-presence of God, good, and to reject the lie of error, whatever its seeming nature or manifestation. We are then understanding that error, or evil, has no reality. In the degree that we reject, as unreal, the claims of sin or error of any kind, according to the simple but inescapable demands of divine Science, we cease to be in subjection to them. A complete denial of evil is found in real innocency.
Innocency may be defined as a mental or spiritual condition from which is excluded all belief in or fear of evil, including the supposition of matter as opposed to Spirit,—a spiritual condition founded on the Christ-ideal of pure spiritual existence. Innocency is not ignorance, which is always at the mercy of aggressive evil; it is not hypocrisy, which imitates what it does not understand; it is not lethargy, which conceals its belief in the reality of evil.
