In answer to the question "How would you define Christian Science?" its Discoverer, Mary Baker Eddy, responds, "As the law of God, the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the divine Principle and rule of universal harmony." Rudimental Divine Science, p. 1 In order to explain the law of God thoroughly so that others could prove its healing power as she did, Mrs. Eddy found that, in addition to examining the goodness and allness of God, she needed to explore the apparent power of evil. At first she followed the general practice of attributing evil to the thoughts and acts of wicked people, but later she came to see that evil is impersonal, that it is not a person, a place, or a thing —nor does it exist in God's creation. She used the term animal magnetism as a specific way of describing the so-called carnal mind and its evil claims, thereby exposing its deceptive nature as a mesmeric enticement to believe in a power opposed to God, good. The argument that evil is real would have to be false, given the fact of good's allness. Through her explanations in Science and Health, we gain a greater awareness of how not to be fooled by evil and its modus operandi. Thus the law of God is better understood and more effectively practiced. And we have the most effective defense against animal magnetism in understanding and obeying this law.
God's spiritual law is the absolute fact of existence, and divine rules show how to apply the law of God to uplift and heal humanity. Animal magnetism claims to reverse God's law, presenting material laws as the absolute facts of existence. This reversal would substitute error for truth, hate for love, misdeeds for good deeds, and present materially contrived arguments to influence human thought and action falsely.
Animal magnetism plays out its deception in consenting human consciousness; but that is precisely where the Comforter, divine Science, contradicts and disposes of evil's falsity with the spiritual facts of man's relation to God. Mesmeric illusion says that matter lives, feels, and acts through material sense, and would convince us to glamorize, coddle, or cuddle it. Christ Jesus said of evil, "When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." John 8:44 A lie talks only of itself; it never presents truth. Christian Science, the demonstrable law of Truth and Love, denies the supposed reality of evil and its claims by exposing the lie as without origin in Truth.
