Unity of Good | Page 7

was the traitorous and cruel
treatment received by old Gloster from his bastard son Edmund which
makes true the lines:
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to
scourge us.
His lawful son, Edgar, was to his father ever loyal. Now God has no
bastards to turn again and rend their Maker. The divine children are
born of law and order, and Truth knows only such.
How well the Shakespearean tale agrees with the word of Scripture, in
Hebrews xii. 7, 8: "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as
with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye
be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards,
and not sons."
The 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