presses essence, I will fully grant you that God is the cause of crime, evil, error, etc. I believe myself to have sufficiently shown, that that which constitutes the reality of evil, error, crime, etc., does not consist in anything which expresses essence, and therefore we cannot say that God is its cause.”[1] Notice that he argues that since God is the cause of all things that have essence or reality he cannot be the cause of evil, which does not have essence or reality, just as Mrs. Eddy reasons. Notice also, as we have had occasion to point out before as being true of both Christian Science and Neoplatonism, that he puts evil and error in the same category. Many sinners are ambitious to prove that a sin and a mistake are one and the same. Man's practical reason denies it, notwithstanding all the fumes of poison let loose in the moral atmosphere by all the sophists from Protagoras to Mary Baker G. Eddy.
In explaining still more the nature of evil Mrs. Eddy identifies it with matter or teaches that it has a material origin and in this also she follows the Neoplatonists. We have seen that she and they teach that matter is the opposite of mind, that matter is to mind as darkness is to light; that is, that matter is the absence or privation of mind. This is the very nature of matter. The nature therefore of error and of evil as privation is determined by their origin.
Mrs. Eddy says: “Matter and its claims of sin, sickness, and death are contrary to God, and
- ↑ Letter, 36.
