THE inspired Word of the Holy Scriptures is authority for the heartening assurance that evil is a deception and unreal, because not a product of the one creator, God. The world is immeasurably debtor to Mary Baker Eddy, in that she discovered this great truth which had for centuries lain in safekeeping in the Bible, and toiled untiringly to present her discovery to human thought in an entirely comprehensible and demonstrable form.
If the assertion that evil is unreal seems startling or incredible to one who may perhaps have been all his life a sincere student of the Bible, let such a one earnestly ask himself what he considers to be the real import of such Scriptural passages as, for example, these from Genesis and St. John respectively: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good;" "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." Clearly, one's belief or disbelief in the unreality of evil argues that he accepts or does not accept as true the unequivocal statements of the Holy Scriptures. Everything that God has made is "very good," and nothing else ever has been made. This truth is the solid rock upon which the entire structure of Christian Science teaching and practice is built; and though the floods of skepticism and the winds of adverse criticism assail this structure, it does not fall, because it is founded upon a rock.
But, asks one, if I accept the Biblical statements that God created only good, and that there is no other creator, of what use will this be to me in meeting and overcoming the various forms of evil that seem so real in my daily experience and in the world at large? If Christian Science could not answer this question, and answer it practically, it would be as an aesthetic abstraction, beautiful, but unable to heal a troubled world. In "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy has written (p. 346) : "The origin of evil is the problem of ages. It confronts each generation anew. It confronts Christian Science. The question is often asked, If God created only the good, whence comes the evil? To this question Christian Science replies: Evil never did exist as an entity. It is but a belief that there is an opposite intelligence to God." Again, in answering the question as to where evil originated, she writes, in part (ibid., p. 45) : "It never originated or existed as an entity. It is but a false belief; even the belief that God is not what the Scriptures imply Him to be, All-in-all, but that there is an opposite intelligence or mind termed evil. This error of belief is idolatry, having 'other gods before me.' "
