Q: Sometimes we get a warning, an “angel message” alerting us to be watchful or to take a particular action. When it’s a positive idea, I understand that. But what if it seems to warn us of evil? If we are praying to know that there is only one Mind and no error, then how can we be warned of something of which divine Mind has no knowledge?
A: Until we outgrow our belief of being a fleshly mortal living in a matter world, we need to discern the mortal thoughts, or tares, sown in human consciousness by the enemy—what the Bible calls the devil (see Matthew 13:24–30). In the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy defines eyes as “spiritual discernment,—not material but mental” (p. 586). Our spiritual discernment—mental eyes—must be wide open at all times to what the devil, mortal mind, claims to be doing. It would be a poor general who didn’t know who the enemy is and his modus operandi. The consciousness of good protects us and causes us to be wise as serpents, as Jesus encouraged us to be (see Matthew 10:16). By establishing divine Love’s absolute omnipresence and the fact that there is no other power but good, God’s angel thoughts uncover and disarm the enemy, those mortal thoughts harmful to the human being.
Fundamental to Christian Science practice is Mrs. Eddy’s great revelation that evil is unreal. A definition worth memorizing and putting into practice is in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901: “Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it” (pp. 12–13). Elsewhere she explains: “God is not the so-called ego of evil; for evil, as a supposition, is the father of itself,—of the material world, the flesh, and the devil. From this falsehood arise the self-destroying elements of this world, its unkind forces, its tempests, lightnings, earthquakes, poisons, rabid beasts, fatal reptiles, and mortals” (Unity of Good, p. 52).
