Unity of Good | Page 7

doubtful or spurious evidence of the senses is not to be admitted,--especially when they testify concerning Spirit, whereof they are confessedly incompetent to speak.
_Evil._ But mortal mind and sin really exist!
_Good._ How can they exist, unless God has created them? And how can He create anything so wholly unlike Himself and foreign to His nature? An evil material mind, so-called, can conceive of God only as like itself, and knowing both evil and good; but a purely good and spiritual consciousness has no sense whereby to cognize evil. Mortal mind is the opposite of immortal Mind, and sin the opposite of goodness. I am the infinite All. From me proceedeth all Mind, all consciousness, all individuality, all being. My Mind is divine good, and cannot drift into evil. To believe in minds many is to depart from the supreme sense of harmony. Your assumptions insist that there is more than the one Mind, more than the one God; but verily I say unto you, God is All-in-all; and you can never be outside of His oneness.
_Evil._ I am a finite consciousness, a material individuality,--a mind in matter, which is both evil and good.
_Good._ All consciousness is Mind; and Mind is God,--an infinite, and not a finite consciousness. This consciousness is reflected in individual consciousness, or man, whose source is infinite Mind. There is no really finite mind, no finite consciousness. There is no material substance, for Spirit is all that endureth, and hence is the only substance. There is, can be, no evil mind, because Mind is God. God and His ideas--that is, God and the universe--constitute all that exists. Man, as God's offspring, must be spiritual, perfect, eternal.
_Evil._ I am something separate from good or God. I am substance. My mind is more than matter. In my mortal mind, matter becomes conscious, and is able to see, taste, hear, feel, smell. Whatever matter thus affirms is mainly correct. If you, O good, deny this, then I deny your truthfulness. If you say that matter is unconscious, you stultify my intellect, insult my conscience, and dispute self-evident facts; for nothing can be clearer than the testimony of the five senses.
_Good._ Spirit is the only substance. Spirit is God, and God is good; hence good is the only substance, the only Mind. Mind is not, cannot be, in matter. It sees, hears, feels, tastes, smells as Mind, and not as matter. Matter cannot talk; and hence, whatever it appears to say of itself is a lie. This lie, that Mind can be in matter,--claiming to be something beside God, denying Truth and its demonstration in Christian Science,--this lie I declare an illusion. This denial enlarges the human intellect by removing its evidence from sense to Soul, and from finiteness into infinity. It honors conscious human individuality by showing God as its source.
_Evil._ I am a creator,--but upon a material, not a spiritual basis. I give life, and I can destroy life.
_Good._ Evil is not a creator. God, good, is the only creator. Evil is not conscious or conscientious Mind; it is not individual, not actual. Evil is not spiritual, and therefore has no groundwork in Life, whose only source is Spirit. The elements which belong to the eternal All,--Life, Truth, Love,--evil can never take away.
_Evil._ I am intelligent matter; and matter is egoistic, having its own innate selfhood and the capacity to evolve mind. God is in matter, and matter reproduces God. From Him come my forms, near or remote. This is my honor, that God is my author, authority, governor, disposer. I am proud to be in His outstretched hands, and I shirk all responsibility for myself as evil, and for my varying manifestations.
_Good._ You mistake, O evil! God is not your authority and law. Neither is He the author of the material changes, the phantasma, a belief in which leads to such teaching as we find in the hymn-verse so often sung in church:--
Chance and change are busy ever, Man decays and ages move; But His mercy waneth never,-- God is wisdom, God is love.
Now if it be true that God's power never waneth, how can it be also true that chance and change are universal factors,--that _man decays_? Many ordinary Christians protest against this stanza of Bowring's, and its sentiment is foreign to Christian Science. If God be changeless goodness, as sings another line of this hymn, what place has chance in the divine economy? Nay, there is in God naught fantastic. All is real, all is serious. The phantasmagoria is a product of human dreams.

The Ego
From various friends comes inquiry as to the meaning of a word employed in the foregoing colloquy.
There are two English words, often used as if they were synonyms, which really have a shade of difference between them.
An egotist is one who talks