"Mind is God," writes Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 469); and she adds, "We can have but one Mind, if that one is infinite." Christian Scientists accept these two statements as demonstrably true. The allness of Mind carries with it the conclusion that everything is mental. Whatever, then, is unlike God must be false and unreal. Matter, being the opposite of Mind, is not a reality; it is a false mental concept. So likewise error, sin, sickness, poverty, death, are false beliefs of so-called mortal mind, and as such are rendered harmless as Christian Scientists learn to understand God and to discern the illusive mental nature of evil.
As a Christian Scientist begins to understand the spiritual nature of God and of man, His divine likeness, his whole outlook on being and existence is amazingly simplified. He learns to know and affirm the truth about God, man, and the universe: that God, Mind, Love, Life, is the creator of all good; that infinite Mind and its infinite creations fill all space, and that the latter are forever manifesting the activities of their inexhaustible cause; that in this Mind and its creations there can be no evil, sin, disease, or death; and that no statement or argument upholding these errors has standing or support in the realm of reality, where Mind, Spirit, rules supreme.
A Christian Scientist does not confine his prayerful mental ministrations wholly to the affirmations of Truth; he finds it essential also to deny evil and all its seeming works. As he grows in spiritual discernment and power, he sees the clear line of demarcation between Truth and error, between understanding and belief. The Christian Scientist naturally and normally affirms the facts of Truth and reality; and he likewise naturally and normally repudiates and rejects the supposititious reality and power of God's unlikeness, evil and mortality. Briefly stated, he affirms Truth and denies error. All things spiritual are mental, because Spirit is Mind. All things evil are likewise mental, but they are a make-believe mental state, which has no more substance than the mirage which appears before the traveler on the desert. The Christian Scientist sees clearly that since Mind is not the creator of illusion, evil has no actual existence.
