Page:Miscellaneous Writings.djvu/53

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ONE CAUSE AND EFFECT
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of evil? What can there be besides infinity? Nothing! Therefore the Science of good calls evil nothing. In divine Science the terms God and good, as Spirit, are synonymous. That God, good, creates evil, or aught that can result in evil, — or that Spirit creates its opposite, named matter, — are conclusions that destroy their premise and prove themselves invalid. Here is where Christian Science sticks to its text, and other systems of religion abandon their own logic. Here also is found the pith of the basal statement, the cardinal point in Christian Science, that matter and evil (including all inharmony, sin, disease, death) are unreal. Mortals accept natural science, wherein no species ever produces its opposite. Then why not accept divine Science on this ground? since the Scriptures maintain this fact by parable and proof, asking, “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” “Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?”

According to reason and revelation, evil and matter are negation: for evil signifies the absence of good, God, though God is ever present; and matter claims something besides God, when God is really All. Creation, evolution, or manifestation, — being in and of Spirit, Mind, and all that really is, — must be spiritual and mental. This is Science, and is susceptible of proof.

But, say you, is a stone spiritual?

To erring material sense, No! but to unerring spiritual sense, it is a small manifestation of Mind, a type of spiritual substance, “the substance of things hoped for.” Mortals can know a stone as substance, only by first admitting that it is substantial. Take away the mortal sense