It is well known that incompatible elements are incapable of commingling harmoniously. For this reason the good and evil tendencies inherent in human nature can never truly unite; much less can these opposites dwell together permanently. While a natural desire for peace has often prompted men to go to great lengths in the direction of compromise, no agreement can ever be reached between truth and error.
As a striking example of this fact, Saul of Tarsus, who had been brought up in the strictest traditions of the Jewish faith, while on his way to Damascus to apprehend Christians, saw a great light and heard a voice. Blinded by the vision which was not only to change his course but to alter his views permanently, he nevertheless saw how completely he had been misled by a false theology which made wrong seem right and vice versa. When he had been led into Damascus and baptized by Ananias, and healed of his blindness, Saul, later to be known as Paul, was ready to devote his life to the great task of preaching Christianity to both Jews and Gentiles, first taking time to fit himself for his sacred mission. Writing long afterwards in his epistle to the Romans, Paul tells us how he found within himself two irreconcilable elements, which he names "the Spirit" and "the flesh," and how through the Christ he succeeded in bringing the latter into subjection to the former.
It is certain that the subtle forces of the so-called carnal mind, which Paul describes so graphically in his epistles, and which he overcame within himself in such considerable degree, must eventually be detected and conquered by each one before the peace of God can reign supreme in the individual consciousness. When this point is seen, one is ready to find in Christian Science, as discovered and founded by Mary Baker Eddy, the true basis of permanent peace, and also to see the suppositional warfare between good and evil as primarily an individual experience. On the basis of God's allness Christ Jesus met and mastered the suggestions of the tempter in the wilderness; Paul proved for himself the truth that had been revealed to him on the Damascus road; and Mrs. Eddy conclusively demonstrated the divine healing Principle of Christian Science before undertaking to elucidate her discovery for mankind.
