Throughout his eventful, successful career, Jesus preached and demonstrated the Christ, Truth, when he healed the sick, stilled the tempest, fed the multitudes, raised the dead. The Master also taught and demonstrated that an understanding of the Christ is a protection and defense against the adversary, and destroys sin. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has written in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 332), "Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness." She continues by saying that the Christ is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life, healing the sick and casting out evils, destroying sin, disease, and death."
Influenced erroneously—mesmerized—by the lying suggestions of evil, mortals may fail to hear and obey the message of the Christ and may unwittingly accept without challenge the aggressive mental suggestions of mortal mind, which deny God and His Christ—enthrone evil and materiality, and perpetuate the belief in anti-Christ. Thus our acquiescence in and indifference to human conflict and world disturbance may continue; and because we do not know what is going on behind the scenes of deception, lawlessness, and crime, we may feel unconcerned and apathetic for a time in regard to the destruction of the hidden evil. Yet a study of the God-inspired writings of Mary Baker Eddy shows us that many years ago, with spiritual enlightenment and Christian fortitude, she endeavored to awaken a slumbering world and warn it of the subtle working of evil's "hidden agents" (ibid., p. 102, marginal heading), which she called by their right name—ignorant, fraudulent, and malicious animal magnetism, or mesmerism. (See also "Miscellaneous Writings" 51:7-9.)
Under the marginal heading just quoted will be found words that help to awaken every individual who reads them. They command our daily watchfulness in detecting and destroying error in all its aspects. Mrs. Eddy says: "The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtle. So secret are the present methods of animal magnetism that they ensnare the age into indolence, and produce the very apathy on the subject which the criminal desires." The Apostle Peter understood that the need of every hour is to be continually alert, for his warning reads, "Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist stedfast in the faith."
