The inspiration of the Hebrew Scriptures is their revelation of the allness of God, in contradistinction to the beliefs of mortals in another being of unlike nature and influence. In the allegory of Eden, which has its counterpart in each human consciousness, the serpent represented the suggestion that there was a condition of things besides good, and that it was proper for Adam and Eve to be acquainted with it. And because of its tragic place in the human drama, as portrayed by Old Testament writers, evil came to be regarded as a God-acknowledged reality, and as a terrible power to be reckoned with by the generations of mankind.
Christ Jesus, the Founder of Christianity, reversed this attitude. He said of himself that he came into the world to bear "witness unto the truth," and that this truth, as men came to understand it, would make them free. The obvious meaning of his statement is, that the conditions from which men seek freedom are contrary to the truth, and hence are not true. This is borne out by another of his statements, namely, that the devil, the personified human sense of all that is not good, has "no truth in him." The Scripture implies that it was believing this mythical devil or serpent, denounced by Jesus as the father of lies, and not something existing of itself, which admitted sin and woe into the consciousness of mortals. It was the same serpent which he encountered and silenced in the wilderness; not as a person, but as the suggested supposition of the opposite of Truth from which all lies come, whatever may be their nature.
In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 346) Mrs. Eddy writes, "The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness —yea, the allness— of Truth."
