Why are earth and mortals so elaborate in beauty, color, and form, if God has no part in them?  By the law of opposites.  The most beautiful blossom is often poisonous, and the most beautiful mansion is sometimes the home of vice.  The senses, not God, Soul, form the condition of beautiful evil, and the supposed modes of self-conscious matter, which make a beautiful lie.  Now a lie takes its pattern from Truth, by reversing Truth.  So evil and all its forms are inverted good.  God never made them; but the lie must say He made them, or it would not be evil.  Being a lie, it would be truthful to call itself a lie; and by calling the knowledge of evil good, and greatly to be desired, it constitutes the lie an evil.

The reality and individuality of man are good and God-made, and they are here to be seen and demonstrated; it is only the evil belief that renders them obscure.

Matter and evil are anti-Christian, the antipodes of Science.  To say that Mind is material, or that evil is Mind, is a misapprehension of being,—­a mistake which will die of its own delusion; for being self-contradictory, it is also self-destructive.  The harmony of man’s being is not built on such false foundations, which are no more logical, philosophical, or scientific than would be the assertion that the rule of addition is the rule of subtraction, and that sums done under both rules would have one quotient.

Man’s individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else he has lost his true individuality as a perfect child of God.  Man’s Father is not a mortal mind and a sinner; or else the immortal and unerring Mind, God, is not his Father; but God is man’s origin and loving Father, hence that saying of Jesus, “Call no man your father upon the earth:  for one is your Father, which is in heaven.”

The bright gold of Truth is dimmed by the doctrine of mind in matter.

To say there is a false claim, called sickness, is to admit all there is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim.  To be healed, one must lose sight of a false claim.  If the claim be present to the thought, then disease becomes as tangible as any reality.  To regard sickness as a false claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called fact of the claim.  In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every claim of error.

As with sickness, so is it with sin.  To admit that sin has any claim whatever, just or unjust, is to admit a dangerous fact.  Hence the fact must be denied; for if sin’s claim be allowed in any degree, then sin destroys the at-one-ment, or oneness with God,—­a unity which sin recognizes as its most potent and deadly enemy.

If God knows sin, even as a false claimant, then acquaintance with that claimant becomes legitimate to mortals, and this knowledge would not be forbidden; but God forbade man to know evil at the very beginning, when Satan held it up before man as something desirable and a distinct addition to human wisdom, because the knowledge of evil would make man a god,—­a representation that God both knew and admitted the dignity of evil.