God is all-loving and has provided all good for man. Yet, the abundance of good seems blatantly and pervasively challenged by the argument that good is something outside of us that we must get.
At one time when I had moved to a large metropolitan area, each morning a friend and I would walk to work past department stores whose display windows were filled with the latest fashions. The clothes were handsome, usually very expensive, and certainly beyond what we could afford at the time. One day I exclaimed, "It's terrible to see such good-looking clothes and not be able to afford them." My friend's reply was prompt and direct: "I'll tell you something that is worse. Having the money to buy them and then finding out that possessing them doesn't satisfy." That stopped me cold, and for the time being we said no more. But one day a few weeks later my friend remarked, "I notice you don't spend a lot of time looking in store windows anymore." After a moment of silence I admitted, "Well, no, I still don't have the money to buy the clothes, but at least I know that my good is not inside those display panels."
The true nature of good is described in this definition from the Glossary of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy: "Good. God; Spirit; omnipotence; omniscience; omnipresence; omni-action." Science and Health, p. 587. To know and understand good as God only, as Spirit instead of matter, as all power, as the divine Mind, presence, and action, is to depart radically from the testimony of the material senses. Mortal thought is imbued with the belief that good is material; it is convinced through false education that substance is objective, outside and separate from man's identity, and obtained only through painstaking effort. So it mightily resists a basic truth taught in Christian Science: good is unfolding eternally within individual consciousness. We discover this fact as we understand and accept man's oneness with God, infinite good.
