On the stage of human events, how often appear characters filling the roles of villains and victims! The fraud deceiving the credulous, the thief taking from the unwary, the falsely ambitious conniving to displace another, the dominating husband and enduring wife, the immoral plotting the fall of the innocent, the malicious attempting to undermine and destroy his fellow man, the unscrupulous ruler grinding down conquered peoples. It is a sad array, mortal mind, alias mortals, with motives base and blind, preying on other mortal minds, all illustrations of Mrs. Eddy's statement. "This false sense of existence is fratricidal" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 539).
What can be done about it? Much, very much. Every such scene and setting can be, must be, broken up, wiped out, and annihilated. But how? By the Mind of Christ, the God-given consciousness which knows that there is no cause but God, infinite good, and no effect but the ideas and identities of God. Unless these tragic scenes are known to the all-knowing Mind, they cannot be substantial and real, and they cannot withstand the God-empowered thinking that recognizes their ungodliness, truthlessness—their unsubstantiality.
What seems to make them so real is the intense belief of mortals that there is a mortal, material mind, identified in materially-thinking, seeing, acting mortals, and that this would-be mind with its mortal puppets is as real as the one deific Mind and its spiritual identities. This mistaken belief can be destroyed, like any mistake, as a knowledge of the fact is gained. The mistake-destroying fact is revealed in the Bible and Science and Health. It is that reality is Spirit, Mind, God, who includes in Himself the only true consciousness, the seeing, hearing, and feeling of all men. He causes them, as His ideas and witnesses, to express only good, one toward another. To Him and to His there is no mortal mind, no villain, no wrong-minded mortal, no puppet of evil, no type of mortal called a victim capable of being deceived and devastated by evil. Infinite intelligence knows none such. No such concepts exist. No such roles are known.
