In the book We Knew Mary Baker Eddy George Wendell Adams relates a story Mrs. Eddy told in one of her classes.We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1979), pp. 109-110. A man who had a fox cut a small hole in his front door and stuck the fox's tail through the hole from inside. A group of people gathered outside, discussing how the fox could have entered through such a small hole. The people, fooled by the deception, were trying to explain what seemed to have happened but which, in fact, had never occurred.
This story was helpful to me at a time when I was trying to answer a question that had plagued me for years: If God is omnipotent, why does evil seem to exist? By asking such a question, I had unknowingly joined ranks with the individuals who were debating how the fox had entered through such a small hole. The more I thought about the question, the more I was tempted to believe in evil as a reality. It was as if I were reliving events in the third chapter of Genesis, where Eve is tempted by the serpent.
This serpent represents error, evil, subtlety, deception, a lie, the delusion of a mortal mind opposed to the divine Mind. Just as Eve had fallen prey to this false consciousness, I, by believing in evil, was eating of error's fruit. This error, the supposed absence of God, seemed to be saying, "Yes, there is good, but look! there is also evil. There is life, but look! there is also death. Yes, there is spiritual intuition, but look! there is also the flesh, the material condition. You cannot deny this." The more I prolonged my "conversation" with evil, the more entangled I became in fallacious logic and delusion.
