"All suffering," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 198 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of both good and evil." And a little later she adds, "Suffering is the supposition of another intelligence than God."
Infinite Mind, expressing itself in a creation which is wholly good, has nothing to do with that whereby suffering is either predicated or produced. The acceptance of suffering as inevitable, sometimes even as desirable, renders mankind habitually insensible to encountering it in the right way. Any form of submission to suffering is the result of false education, and of ignorance of the nature of omnipotence.
It was proved beyond question by Jesus that evil has neither prerogative nor mandate, and that there is always available and operative a spiritual law which destroys its seeming power. Thus, consistently throughout his ministry, he healed sin and suffering, whatever their seeming cause, and however firmly fixed in the thought of the individual. The great mission of the Christ in the lives of men is to enable them to separate themselves from the conflicting beliefs of false cause and effect—the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—and to teach them that God, good, alone is cause, and therefore effect, like its source, must be good.
