When Christ Jesus named the devil, or evil, "a liar, and the father of it," he disclosed its powerlessness, for a liar has no ability to produce an actual effect, hence no power. If it seems to produce an effect, then that effect must be a deception and liable to destruction the moment its false nature is understood. Christian Science explains that there is but one evil and that one the false consciousness, or carnal mind, which peoples itself with mortal concepts, but which has no cognizance of God and His universe of divine ideas. Science proves the powerlessness of this suppositional mind by destroying the illusions it has claimed to produce and by preventing it from evolving others. This it does through the demonstration of God as divine Truth, as the only Mind and the only producer of effect.
The fact is that so-called mortal mind can deceive only itself. It dwells within its own self-constituted realm of thought, seeing only what it believes, but always believing that what it sees is external to itself. Mary Baker Eddy discovered that matter is a subjective state of mortal thought and that it has no more substance than the human belief which supports it. In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she exposes the mortally mental state of self-deception where she writes (p. 220), "Mortal mind produces its own phenomena, and then charges them to something else,—like a kitten glancing into the mirror at itself and thinking it sees another kitten." And the marginal caption of this arresting paragraph is "The reflex phenomena."
This scientific explanation of matter and the false mind which perceives it by believing it, isolates error and shows that it has no part in man, who is the reflex image of the one Mind, God, and who is conscious only of that which is included in the Mind he reflects. Then, liar and lie, believer and belief, being one, they must be destroyed as one, for material illusions with their discords and their empty pleasures cannot be separated from the mind conceiving them. Spiritual man is undeceived, and one's power over evil lies in his understanding that actually he is that man and not a deceived mortal. Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 403), "You command the situation if you understand that mortal existence is a state of self-deception and not the truth of being."
