If God cannot know evil, how can He control it? If, as Christian Science teaches, divine Mind can never be conscious of evil's claim to produce human want and woe, how can divine Mind, God, deliver men from evil? The answer is, By not permitting evil to be; by forbidding its existence. God is all presence and He knows He is. Consequently there is no other presence to be known and nothing that can know any other presence. Since God is wholly good, that truth disposes of the question of evil. Where the ground is already completely occupied by that which cannot be dislodged, there can be no other occupant of the same ground.
In the light of these facts evil, if it seems to be present, is obviously illusion, and the presence of illusion can only seem to be real to the illusion itself. The Mind which knows reality is, to the illusion, as completely absent as if it did not exist. But that seeming absence has no truth and therefore no power. Any individual who, in supposition, adopts the illusion as his consciousness can witness God's control of evil by simply awakening to some glimpse of the presence of God as man's Mind—his Mind insofar as he knows it. The degree of the awakening determines the degree of the disappearance of evil from his consciousness and therefore from his experience.
That is at least one aspect of the real meaning of the Psalmist's confident petition to God to remove all evil thoughts from him. In Psalm 68:2 he sang, "As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God." There is therefore no contradiction in the two statements of truth that God is the Mind which knows only good and that God nevertheless governs both good and evil.
