WHERE is good? This may seem an elementary question to students of Christian Science and others who have learned in some degree that God is good, and that He is everywhere. Yet do not some of us often find ourselves looking for good, virtually chasing it, as if it were to be found in some places but not in others —not, of all places, in us? Jesus declared (Luke 17:21), "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."
Good is the essential, invariable nature of God. And because man, God's image, reflects, expresses, and is inseparable from Him, good must be at all times precisely where man is. Do we not sometimes try to get away from good's supposititious opposite, evil, as if evil not only were real but were present in some places and not in others? Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 480), "Where the spirit of God is, and there is no place where God is not, evil becomes nothing,—the opposite of the something of Spirit."
Before we learn of the unreality of evil in Christian Science, much time may be spent in striving to escape from unhappy places and conditions, and in trying to find good. Two basic facts should be guiding us: the first, that harmony, a quality of God, is omnipresent; and the second, that dissatisfaction, want, discord, unsatisfactory conditions of any nature, exist only in supposititious mortal thinking. Who has not at some time found himself entertaining the thought that if only he lived in another house, or neighborhood, or city, or even another country, his troubles would be over? How many have assumed that they would find peace, happiness, supply, and right activity if only they were in another office, another job, or another line of business? Have they not been looking for the change itself to bring good into operation? This, it is clear, is admitting that one believes good, and thus God, to be finite, determined by material conditions, active in one house, available in one job, but not in another. But this is not so even for a moment.
