In certain old folk tales trouble is always knocking at the door of the householder. Each time it comes in a different guise, the wolf in the costume of a lamb, the witch in a charming mask. In the Bible, too, evil assumes various forms in its claims to imitate good. The carnal mind is there represented as a serpent, a devil, and a dragon, but, no matter what its disguise, the watchful Christian Scientist is learning to recognize wrong thinking in any form as aggressive evil suggestion and to know it as powerless, causeless, and unreal.
Corporeal sense, the serpent, tempts us to believe that it is we who do the talking when it says, "I feel pain in my body;" "I am incapable of being a success;" "My neighbor is a sinner; I will reform him;" "I am disturbed over so much wrongdoing in the world."
By frequently changing its form, evil, or the carnal mind, would deceive us. One of its most deceptive arguments is that there are types of depravity, of chicanery, which we are justified in accepting as real. Some crimes are so low, it says, that it is righteous to be indignant about them. A false, personal sense of selfhood would make us think that we are "not as other men are." So, it says, we should get busy and stop all the evil that others are doing. But our God-given spiritual sense of Life and man unmasks this false pretender and enables us to discern the spiritual creation, man and the universe, as the only outcome of a loving and good God.
