A group of fishermen were talking. One asked, "What's happened to Pietro? He hasn't been around lately." They all glanced at Pietro's father, who frowned and shook his head. "He has gone fishing with a golden hook, and the fish ran off with it." His friends nodded sagely, sadly.
It came out that Pietro had become infatuated with a girl he thought glamorous, followed her, and fallen in with other undesirable companions. One of the group did not understand the aphorism. Another explained: No matter how big the fish, if it made off with the golden hook, the fisherman would lose more than he could possibly have gained.
Better than many, the fishermen apparently understood the nature of temptation: the glitter seeming to conceal the fraud. Had they known of Christian Science, they would also have known how to help Pietro reject temptation, for Science exposes the utter unreality of evil, rips away its masks of pretense, and destroys it on the basis of its godlessness. Not being derived from infinite good, evil's challenge to good's infinitude shows evil to be a liar. And what happens to a lie when pitted against the truth it lies about?
