"As we visit penitentiaries, reform schools and hospitals, as we read and hear the startling statements of press and pulpit, we grow disconsolate and heavy-hearted over the awful power and reality of evil, forgetting again that He who is perfect goodness can not behold evil or in any way permit its existence, any more than heat can permit cold, or light can permit darkness.
"Granting the omnipotence of Good, where is there any room for its opposite?
"If there is but one Power, and that omnipotent and perfect, there can be no evil in reality; hence we are dealing with another lie when we judge according to appearances, which Jesus said we should not do. It is really disloyalty to God to impute to Him all misery, pain, sickness and suffering caused by the evil and ignorance of man. We are told: 'Let your soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God.' Because we have not done so, but have believed in every claim power, we suffer from 'evils which our own misdeeds have wrought,' as Milton wrote, or, in the words of Emerson, 'we miscreate our own evils.'
"Jeremiah said: 'It is your sins that have withholden the good things from you.'
"According to Webster, 'sin is a transgression of the law of God.' There is but one law—the perfect and unchangeable Truth. Any deviation from Truth is error, and error is sin. In proportion as we deviate from the strictly true, then, we sin. Because we admit things to be true which are not true, we admit, then commit sin, and hence suffer for sin. 'Know ye not that to whomsoever ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are, whether of sin unto death or obedience unto righteousness,' wrote Paul. We first think wrong. Sin is of the mind, not of the body.
"To acknowledge the reality of sin or evil is a transgression of the law, because, according to our established premise, it cannot be true.
"Through a misconception of our relation to God, and a belief in the power of evil, we are obliged to admit the existence of sin, sickness, and death, neither of which can be true in the presence of God, as the only Reality, in which or in whom are all things that eternally are, not that temporarily appear.
"We have believed in a mind or power of thought opposite and contrary to God, when in reality there can be nothing opposite or contrary to eternal Mind. We have believed ourselves endowed with a mind separate from God, and ourselves subject to temptation from some cause not Good. We have believed in minds, when there is but one Mind.
"This false force, this false mind, is variously called the evil or carnal mind, the mind of the flesh, the old man, the serpent, the devil, the adversary. It is simply the opposite or contradictory of the Good, the god of evil.
"Beside every true or positive statement there is a false or negative claim, and in so far as we are ignorant of the true, we are in bondage to the false. To believe the claims of error is to be bound; to know the reality of truth is to be free. To believe in a mind or power separate or opposite from God, is to be subject to any suppositions or beliefs formulated by that mind or negative thought.