From one end of the Bible to the other is iterated the truth of God's omnipotent goodness, which shows His ability to keep His creation, including man, healthy, harmonious, and happy, and of His love, which makes Him willing to do so. Over and over again the sacred pages tell us of a God who is good, all-powerful, merciful, gentle, and just; of an intelligence, or Mind, which is the source of all true being and makes all that is made. And they tell us that there is none else. The Scriptures also give proof upon proof of the present availability of God, or good, to man. The simple and only conclusion to be drawn from this premise is that evil, being the direct opposite of good, could not possibly be experienced in a creation under this Mind's loving protection and care.
The mortal or carnal mind, so called, claims to oppose these facts and invert them. It insists that God creates evil as well as good and that therefore evil is as real as good. This denial of truth, taken in its widest aspect, constitutes what Christian Science calls mental malpractice. Error claims to pursue this false premise to the point where it believes that each individual has a limited mind of his own with which he can, by his own volition, injure another either mistakenly or willfully.
Mary Baker Eddy has defined this seeming influence in her work "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she says of mental malpractice (p. 451), "It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose."
