It was in grammar school. Johnny, annoyed with another lad, exclaimed, "Aw, he don't know nothin'."
The teacher said, "Now, John, you should have said, 'He doesn't know anything.' But the way you did say it, you made another point. Because, if he does not know nothing he must know something. We call that a double negative, and it makes a positive."
Doesn't an incident like this hint at what we are learning to do in Christian Science—to negate the negative (error in all its forms) and so bring out the positive reality? It is understanding of Truth that enables us to deny error. Christian Science is the law of Truth, which comes to reveal God as infinite Spirit, the one and only substance, the creator of His one and only spiritual universe, including His one and only spiritual man. With a variation on the double negative we can eliminate error's negative statement with a negation of our own—one that points out what error is not—namely that regardless of what it says, error is not real.
