No and Yes | Page 8

hinders the destruction of evil. To conceive of God as
resembling--in personality, or form--the personality that Jesus
condemned as devilish, is fraught with spiritual danger. Evil can neither
grasp the prerogative of God nor make evil omnipotent and
omnipresent.
Jesus said to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan;" but he to whom our
Lord gave the keys of the kingdom could not have been wholly evil,
and therefore was not a devil, after the accepted definition. Out of the
Magdalen, Jesus cast seven devils; but not one person was named
among them. According to Crabtre, these devils were the diseases Jesus
cast out.

The most eminent divines, in Europe and America, concede that the
Scriptures have both a literal and a moral meaning. Which of the two is
the more important to gain,--the literal or the moral sense of the word
devil,--in order to cast out this devil? Evil is a quality, not an
individual.
As mortals, we need to discern the claims of evil, and to fight these
claims, not as realities, but as illusions; but Deity can have no such
warfare against Himself. Knowledge of a man's physical personality is
not sufficient to inform us as to the amount of good or evil he possesses.
Hence we cannot understand God or man, through the person of either.
God is All-in-all; but He is definite and individual, the omnipresent and
omniscient Mind; and man's individuality is God's own image and
likeness,--even the immeasurable idea of divine Mind. In the Science of
good, evil loses all place, person, and power.
According to Spinoza's philosophy God is amplification. He is in all
things, and therefore He is in evil in human thought. He is extension, of
whatever character. Also, according to Spinoza, man is an animal
vegetable, developed through the lower orders of matter and mortal
mind. All these vagaries are at variance with my system of metaphysics,
which rests on God as One and All, and denies the actual existence of
both matter and evil. According to false philosophy and scholastic
theology, God is three persons in one person. By the same token, evil is
not only as real as good, but much more real, since evil subordinates
good in personality.
The claims of evil become both less and more in Christian Science,
than in human philosophies or creeds: more, because the evil that is
hidden by dogma and human reason is uncovered by Science; and less,
because evil, being thus uncovered, is found out, and exposure is nine
points of destruction. Then appears the grand verity of Christian
Science: namely, that evil has no claims and was never a claimant; for
behold evil (or devil) is, as Jesus said, "a murderer from the beginning,
and the truth abode not in him."
There was never a moment in which evil was real. This great fact
concerning all error brings with it another and more glorious truth, that

good is supreme. As there is none beside Him, and He is all good, there
can be no evil. Simply uttering this great thought is not enough! We
must live it, until God becomes the All and Only of our being. Having
won through great tribulation this cardinal point of divine Science, St.
Paul said, "But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead
wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and
not in the oldness of the letter."

IS MAN A PERSON?
Man is more than physical personality, or what we cognize through the
material senses. Mind is more than matter, even as the infinite idea of
Truth is beyond a finite belief. Man outlives finite mortal definitions of
himself, according to a law of "the survival of the fittest." Man is the
eternal idea of his divine Principle, or Father. He is neither matter nor a
mode of mortal mind, for he is spiritual and eternal, an immortal mode
of the divine Mind. Man is the image and likeness of God, coexistent
and coeternal with Him.
Man is not absorbed in Deity; for he is forever individual; but what this
everlasting individuality is, remains to be learned. Mortals have not
seen it. That which is born of the flesh is not man's eternal identity.
Spiritual and immortal man alone is God's likeness, and that which is
mortal is not man in a spiritually scientific sense. A material, sinful
mortal is but the counterfeit of immortal man.
The mind-quacks believe that mortal man is identical with immortal
man, and that the immortal is inside the mortal; that good and evil
blend; that matter and Spirit are one; and that Soul, or Spirit, is
subdivided into spirits, or souls,--alias gods. This infantile talk about
Mind-healing is no more identical with Christian Science than the babe
is identical