UNITY OF GOOD

BY

MARY BAKER EDDY

AUTHOR OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES

Registered U.S. Patent Office

Published by The Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy

BOSTON, U.S.A.

Authorized Literature of
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST
in Boston, Massachusetts

_Copyright, 1887, 1891, 1908_
BY MARY BAKER G. EDDY
_Copyright renewed, 1915_
_Copyright renewed, 1919_

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




Contents


Caution in the Truth
_Does God know or behold sin, sickness, and death?_

Seedtime and Harvest
_Is anything real of which the physical senses are cognizant?_

The Deep Things of God

Ways Higher than Our Ways

Rectifications

A Colloquy

The Ego

Soul

There is no Matter
_Sight_
_Touch_
_Taste_
_Force_

Is There no Death?

Personal Statements

Credo
_Do you believe in God?_
_Do you believe in man?_
_Do you believe in matter?_
_What say you of woman?_
_What say you of evil?_

Suffering from Others' Thoughts

The Saviour's Mission

Summary




Unity of Good

Caution in the Truth


Perhaps no doctrine of Christian Science rouses so much natural doubt and
questioning as this, that God knows no such thing as sin. Indeed, this may
be set down as one of the "things hard to be understood," such as the
apostle Peter declared were taught by his fellow-apostle Paul, "which they
that are unlearned and unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." (2
Peter iii. 16.)

Let us then reason together on this important subject, whose statement in
Christian Science may justly be characterized as _wonderful_.


_Does God know or behold sin, sickness, and death?_

The nature and character of God is so little apprehended and demonstrated
by mortals, that I counsel my students to defer this infinite inquiry, in
their discussions of Christian Science. In fact, they had better leave the
subject untouched, until they draw nearer to the divine character, and are
practically able to testify, by their lives, that as they come closer to
the true understanding of God they lose all sense of error.

The Scriptures declare that God is too pure to behold iniquity (Habakkuk
i. 13); but they also declare that God pitieth them who fear Him; that
there is no place where His voice is not heard; that He is "a very present
help in trouble."

The sinner has no refuge from sin, except in God, who is his salvation. We
must, however, realize God's presence, power, and love, in order to be
saved from sin. This realization takes away man's fondness for sin and his
pleasure in it; and, lastly, it removes the pain which accrues to him from
it. Then follows this, as the _finale_ in Science: The sinner loses his
sense of sin, and gains a higher sense of God, in whom there is no sin.

The true man, really _saved_, is ready to testify of God in the infinite
penetration of Truth, and can affirm that the Mind which is good, or God,
has no knowledge of sin.

In the same manner the sick lose their sense of sickness, and gain that
spiritual sense of harmony which contains neither discord nor disease.

According to this same rule, in divine Science, the dying--if they die in
the Lord--awake from a sense of death to a sense of Life in Christ, with a
knowledge of Truth and Love beyond what they possessed before; because
their lives have grown so far toward the stature of manhood in Christ
Jesus, that they are ready for a spiritual transfiguration, through their
affections and understanding.

Those who reach this transition, called _death_, without having rightly
improved the lessons of this primary school of mortal existence,--and still
believe in matter's reality, pleasure, and pain,--are not ready to
understand immortality. Hence they awake only to another sphere of
experience, and must pass through another probationary state before it can
be truly said of them: "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord."

They upon whom the second death, of which we read in the Apocalypse
(Revelation xx. 6), hath no power, are those who have obeyed God's
commands, and have washed their robes white through the sufferings of the
flesh and the triumphs of Spirit. Thus they have reached the goal in divine
Science, by knowing Him in whom they have believed. This knowledge is not
the forbidden fruit of sin, sickness, and death, but it is the fruit which
grows on the "tree of life." This is the understanding of God, whereby man
is found in the image and likeness of good, not of evil; of health, not of
sickness; of Life, not of death.

God is All-in-all. Hence He is in Himself only, in His own nature and
character, and is perfect being, or consciousness. He is all the Life and
Mind there is or can be. Within Himself is every embodiment of Life and
Mind.

If He is All, He can have no consciousness of anything unlike Himself;
because, if He is omnipresent, there can be nothing outside of Himself.

Now this self-same God is our helper. He pities us. He has mercy upon us,
and guides every event of our careers. He is near to them who adore Him.
To understand Him, without a single taint of our mortal, finite sense of
sin, sickness, or death, is to approach Him and become like Him.

Truth is God, and in God's law. This law declares that Truth is All, and
there is no error. This law of Truth destroys every phase of error. To gain
a temporary consciousness of God's law is to feel, in a certain finite
human sense, that God comes to us and pities us; but the attainment of the
understanding of His presence, through the Science of God, destroys our
sense of imperfection, or of His absence, through a diviner sense that God
is all true consciousness; and this convinces us that, as we get still
nearer Him, we must forever lose our own consciousness of error.

But how could we lose all consciousness of error, if God be conscious of
it? God has not forbidden man to know Him; on the contrary, the Father bids
man have the same Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus,"--which was
certainly the divine Mind; but God does forbid man's acquaintance with
evil. Why? Because evil is no part of the divine knowledge.

John's Gospel declares (xvii. 3) that "life eternal" consists in the
knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ, whom He has sent.
Surely from such an understanding of Science, such knowing, the vision of
sin is wholly excluded.

Nevertheless, at the present crude hour, no wise men or women will rudely
or prematurely agitate a theme involving the All of infinity.

Rather will they rejoice in the small understanding they have already
gained of the wholeness of Deity, and work gradually and gently up toward
the perfect thought divine. This meekness will increase their apprehension
of God, because their mental struggles and pride of opinion will
proportionately diminish.

Every one should be encouraged not to accept any personal opinion on so
great a matter, but to seek the divine Science of this question of Truth by
following upward individual convictions, undisturbed by the frightened
sense of any need of attempting to solve every Life-problem in a day.

"Great is the mystery of godliness," says Paul; and _mystery_ involves the
unknown. No stubborn purpose to force conclusions on this subject will
unfold in us a higher sense of Deity; neither will it promote the Cause of
Truth or enlighten the individual thought.

Let us respect the rights of conscience and the liberty of the sons of God,
so letting our "moderation be known to all men." Let no enmity, no
untempered controversy, spring up between Christian Science students and
Christians who wholly or partially differ from them as to the nature of sin
and the marvellous unity of man with God shadowed forth in scientific
thought. Rather let the stately goings of this wonderful part of Truth be
left to the supernal guidance.

"These are but parts of Thy ways," says Job; and the whole is greater than
its parts. Our present understanding is but "the seed within itself," for
it is divine Science, "bearing fruit after its kind."

Sooner or later the whole human race will learn that, in proportion as the
spotless selfhood of God is understood, human nature will be renovated, and
man will receive a higher selfhood, derived from God, and the redemption of
mortals from sin, sickness, and death be established on everlasting
foundations.

The Science of physical harmony, as now presented to the people in divine
light, is radical enough to promote as forcible collisions of thought as
the age has strength to bear. Until the heavenly law of health, according
to Christian Science, is firmly grounded, even the thinkers are not
prepared to answer intelligently leading questions about God and sin, and
the world is far from ready to assimilate such a grand and all-absorbing
verity concerning the divine nature and character as is embraced in the
theory of God's blindness to error and ignorance of sin. No wise mother,
though a graduate of Wellesley College, will talk to her babe about the
problems of Euclid.

Not much more than a half-century ago the assertion of universal salvation
provoked discussion and horror, similar to what our declarations about sin
and Deity must arouse, if hastily pushed to the front while the platoons of
Christian Science are not yet thoroughly drilled in the plainer manual of
their spiritual armament. "Wait patiently on the Lord;" and in less than
another fifty years His name will be magnified in the apprehension of this
new subject, as already He is glorified in the wide extension of belief in
the impartial grace of God,--shown by the changes at Andover Seminary and
in multitudes of other religious folds.

Nevertheless, though I thus speak, and from my heart of hearts, it is due
both to Christian Science and myself to make also the following statement:
When I have most clearly seen and most sensibly felt that the infinite
recognizes no disease, this has not separated me from God, but has so bound
me to Him as to enable me instantaneously to heal a cancer which had eaten
its way to the jugular vein.

In the same spiritual condition I have been able to replace dislocated
joints and raise the dying to instantaneous health. People are now living
who can bear witness to these cures. Herein is my evidence, from on high,
that the views here promulgated on this subject are correct.

Certain self-proved propositions pour into my waiting thought in connection
with these experiences; and here is one such conviction: that an
acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power
nothing else can. An incontestable point in divine Science is, that because
God is All, a realization of this fact dispels even the sense or
consciousness of sin, and brings us nearer to God, bringing out the highest
phenomena of the All-Mind.




Seedtime and Harvest


Let another query now be considered, which gives much trouble to many
earnest thinkers before Science answers it.


_Is anything real of which the physical senses are cognizant?_

Everything is as real as you make it, and no more so. What you see, hear,
feel, is a mode of consciousness, and can have no other reality than the
sense you entertain of it.

It is dangerous to rest upon the evidence of the senses, for this evidence
is not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that
is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. That
which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper
understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their
deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race.

All forms of error are uprooted in Science, on the same basis whereby
sickness is healed,--namely, by the establishment, through reason,
revelation, and Science, of the nothingness of every claim of error, even
the doctrine of heredity and other physical causes. You demonstrate the
process of Science, and it proves my view conclusively, that mortal mind
is the cause of all disease. Destroy the mental sense of the disease, and
the disease itself disappears. Destroy the sense of sin, and sin itself
disappears.

Material and sensual consciousness are mortal. Hence they must, some time
and in some way, be reckoned unreal. That time has partially come, or my
words would not have been spoken. Jesus has made the way plain,--so plain
that all are without excuse who walk not in it; but this way is not the
path of physical science, human philosophy, or mystic psychology.

The talent and genius of the centuries have wrongly reckoned. They have not
based upon revelation their arguments and conclusions as to the source and
resources of being,--its combinations, phenomena, and outcome,--but have
built instead upon the sand of human reason. They have not accepted the
simple teaching and life of Jesus as the only true solution of the
perplexing problem of human existence.

Sometimes it is said, by those who fail to understand me, that I
_monopolize_; and this is said because ideas akin to mine have been held by
a few spiritual thinkers in all ages. So they have, but in a far different
form. Healing has gone on continually; yet healing, as I teach it, has not
been practised since the days of Christ.

What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?
This: that _by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death_, you
demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system
from all others. The reality of these so-called existences I deny, because
they are not to be found in God, and this system is built on Him as the
sole cause. It would be difficult to name any previous teachers, save Jesus
and his apostles, who have thus taught.

If there be any _monopoly_ in my teaching, it lies in this utter reliance
upon the one God, to whom belong all things.

Life is God, or Spirit, the supersensible eternal. The universe and man are
the spiritual phenomena of this one infinite Mind. Spiritual phenomena
never converge toward aught but infinite Deity. Their gradations are
spiritual and divine; they cannot collapse, or lapse into their opposites,
for God is their divine Principle. They live, because He lives; and they
are eternally perfect, because He is perfect, and governs them in the Truth
of divine Science, whereof God is the Alpha and Omega, the centre and
circumference.

To attempt the calculation of His mighty ways, from the evidence before the
material senses, is fatuous. It is like commencing with the minus sign, to
learn the principle of positive mathematics.

God was not in the whirlwind. He is not the blind force of a material
universe. Mortals must learn this; unless, pursued by their fears, they
would endeavor to hide from His presence under their own falsities, and
call in vain for the mountains of unholiness to shield them from the
penalty of error.

Jesus taught us to walk _over_, not _into_ or _with_, the currents of
matter, or mortal mind. His teachings beard the lions in their dens. He
turned the water into wine, he commanded the winds, he healed the
sick,--all in direct opposition to human philosophy and so-called natural
science. He annulled the laws of matter, showing them to be laws of mortal
mind, not of God. He showed the need of changing this mind and its abortive
laws. He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this
change through the higher laws of God. The palsied hand moved, despite the
boastful sense of physical law and order. Jesus stooped not to human
consciousness, nor to the evidence of the senses. He heeded not the taunt,
"That withered hand looks very real and feels very real;" but he cut off
this vain boasting and destroyed human pride by taking away the material
evidence. If his patient was a theologian of some bigoted sect, a
physician, or a professor of natural philosophy,--according to the ruder
sort then prevalent,--he never thanked Jesus for restoring his senseless
hand; but neither red tape nor indignity hindered the divine process. Jesus
required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for
perfection and its possibilities. He said that the kingdom of heaven is
here, and is included in Mind; that while ye say, There are yet four
months, and _then_ cometh the harvest, I say, Look up, not down, for your
fields are already white for the harvest; and gather the harvest by mental,
not material processes. The laborers are few in this vineyard of
Mind-sowing and reaping; but let them apply to the waiting grain the
curving sickle of Mind's eternal circle, and bind it with bands of Soul.




The Deep Things of God


Science reverses the evidence of the senses in theology, on the same
principle that it does in astronomy. Popular theology makes God tributary
to man, coming at human call; whereas the reverse is true in Science. Men
must approach God reverently, doing their own work in obedience to divine
law, if they would fulfil the intended harmony of being.

The principle of music knows nothing of discord. God is harmony's selfhood.
His universal laws, His unchangeableness, are not infringed in ethics any
more than in music. To Him there is no moral inharmony; as we shall learn,
proportionately as we gain the true understanding of Deity. If God could be
conscious of sin, His infinite power would straightway reduce the universe
to chaos.

If God has any real knowledge of sin, sickness, and death, they must be
eternal; since He is, in the very fibre of His being, "without beginning of
years or end of days." If God knows that which is not permanent, it follows
that He knows something which He must learn to _unknow_, for the benefit of
our race.

Such a view would bring us upon an outworn theological platform, which
contains such planks as the divine repentance, and the belief that God must
one day do His work over again, because it was not at first done aright.

Can it be seriously held, by any thinker, that long after God made the
universe,--earth, man, animals, plants, the sun, the moon, and "the stars
also,"--He should so gain wisdom and power from past experience that He
could vastly improve upon His own previous work,--as Burgess, the
boatbuilder, remedies in the Volunteer the shortcomings of the Puritan's
model?

Christians are commanded to _grow in grace_. Was it necessary for God to
grow in grace, that He might rectify His spiritual universe?

The Jehovah of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because His
created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of "the
Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone of living
rock, firmer than everlasting hills.

As God is Mind, if this Mind is familiar with evil, all cannot be good
therein. Our infinite model would be taken away. What is in eternal Mind
must be reflected in man, Mind's image. How then could man escape, or hope
to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his creator?

God never said that man would become better by learning to distinguish evil
from good,--but the contrary, that by this knowledge, by man's first
disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our woe."

"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men
rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know
more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely cognizant of sin?

God created all things, and pronounced them good. Was evil among these good
things? Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so must man, or
the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.

If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction
comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature is
punished for his likeness to his creator.

God is commonly called the _sinless_, and man the _sinful_; but if the
thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless?
Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and
human sin become only an echo of the divine?

Such vagaries are to be found in heathen religious history. There are, or
have been, devotees who worship not the good Deity, who will not harm them,
but the bad deity, who seeks to do them mischief, and whom therefore they
wish to bribe with prayers into quiescence, as a criminal appeases, with a
money-bag, the venal officer.

Surely this is no Christian worship! In Christianity man bows to the
infinite perfection which he is bidden to imitate. In Truth, such
terms as _divine sin_ and _infinite sinner_ are unheard-of
contradictions,--absurdities; but _would_ they be sheer nonsense, if God
has, or can have, a real knowledge of sin?




Ways Higher than Our Ways


A lie has only one chance of successful deception,--to be accounted true.
Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem part of
eternal Truth.

Emerson says, "Hitch your wagon to a star." I say, Be allied to the deific
power, and all that is good will aid your journey, as the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera. (Judges v. 20.) Hourly, in Christian
Science, man thus weds himself with God, or rather he ratifies a union
predestined from all eternity; but evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the
divine chariots,--or seeks so to do,--that its vileness may be christened
purity, and its darkness get consolation from borrowed scintillations.

Jesus distinctly taught the arrogant Pharisees that, from the beginning,
their father, the devil, was the would-be murderer of Truth. A right
apprehension of the wonderful utterances of him who "spake as never man
spake," would despoil error of its borrowed plumes, and transform the
universe into a home of marvellous light,--"a consummation devoutly to be
wished."

Error says God must know evil because He knows all things; but Holy Writ
declares God told our first parents that in the day when they should
partake of the fruit of evil, they must surely die. Would it not absurdly
follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil necessarily leads
to extinction? Rather let us think of God as saying, I am infinite good;
therefore I know not evil. Dwelling in light, I can see only the brightness
of My own glory.

Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and sees it
not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy everything
that is unlike Myself.

Many fancy that our heavenly Father reasons thus: If pain and sorrow were
not in My mind, I could not remedy them, and wipe the tears from the eyes
of My children. Error says you must know grief in order to console it.
Truth, God, says you oftenest console others in troubles that you have not.
Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?

God says, I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My
sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone
enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.

Error says God must know death in order to strike at its root; but God
saith, I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever
conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. I am All. A knowledge
of aught beside Myself is impossible.

If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.

With God, _knowledge_ is necessarily _foreknowledge_; and _foreknowledge_
and _foreordination_ must be one, in an infinite Being. What Deity
_foreknows_, Deity must _foreordain_; else He is not omnipotent, and, like
ourselves, He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet
which He cannot avert.

If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He
foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it
aforetime,--foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?

But this we cannot believe of God; for if the supreme good could predestine
or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of
infinite moral unity. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness,
how great is that darkness!" On the contrary, evil is only a delusive
deception, without any actuality which Truth can know.




Rectifications


How is a mistake to be rectified? By reversal or revision,--by seeing it in
its proper light, and then turning it or turning from it.

We undo the statements of error by reversing them.

Through these three statements, or misstatements, evil comes into
authority:--

_First:_ The Lord created it.
_Second:_ The Lord knows it.
_Third:_ I am afraid of it.

By a reverse process of argument evil must be dethroned:--

_First:_ God never made evil.
_Second:_ He knows it not.
_Third:_ We therefore need not fear it.

Try this process, dear inquirer, and so reach that perfect Love which
"casteth out fear," and then see if this Love does not destroy in you all
hate and the sense of evil. You will awake to the perception of God as
All-in-all. You will find yourself losing the knowledge and the operation
of sin, proportionably as you realize the divine infinitude and believe
that He can see nothing outside of His own focal distance.




A Colloquy


In Romans (ii. 15) we read the apostle's description of mental processes
wherein human thoughts are "the mean while accusing or else excusing one
another." If we observe our mental processes, we shall find that we are
perpetually arguing with ourselves; yet each mortal is not two
personalities, but one.

In like manner good and evil talk to one another; yet they are not two but
one, for evil is naught, and good only is reality.

_Evil._ God hath said, "Ye shall eat of every tree of the garden." If you
do not, your intellect will be circumscribed and the evidence of your
personal senses be denied. This would antagonize individual consciousness
and existence.

_Good._ The Lord is God. With Him is no consciousness of evil, because
there is nothing beside Him or outside of Him. Individual consciousness in
man is inseparable from good. There is no sensible matter, no sense in
matter; but there is a spiritual sense, a sense of Spirit, and this is the
only consciousness belonging to true individuality, or a divine sense of
being.

_Evil._ Why is this so?

_Good._ Because man is made after God's eternal likeness, and this likeness
consists in a sense of harmony and immortality, in which no evil can
possibly dwell. You may eat of the fruit of Godlikeness, but as to the
fruit of ungodliness, which is opposed to Truth,--ye shall not touch it,
lest ye die.

_Evil._ But I would taste and know error for myself.

_Good._ Thou shalt not admit that error is something to know or be known,
to eat or be eaten, to see or be seen, to feel or be felt. To admit the
existence of error would be to admit the truth of a lie.

_Evil._ But there is something besides good. God knows that a knowledge of
this something is essential to happiness and life. A lie is as genuine as
Truth, though not so legitimate a child of God. Whatever exists must come
from God, and be important to our knowledge. Error, even, is His offspring.

_Good._ Whatever cometh not from the eternal Spirit, has its origin in the
physical senses and material brains, called _human intellect_ and
_will-power_,--_alias_ intelligent matter.

In Shakespeare's tragedy of King Lear, it 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