sibly, like other contradictions, it is
there only to be solved."[33]

[Footnote 33: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 45.]

_The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind_

Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying the
reality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain and
sickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of the
testimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned.[34]
(Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to her
denial of the reality of physical ills.) And here the word comes in
which is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was ever
burdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition of
physical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of the
material side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddy
makes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way.) What one may call
the whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is denied
and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is,
in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind.
Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology;
error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that
which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritual
sense; sin; sickness; death."[35]

[Footnote 34: "Science and Health," last edition, pp. 108, 120, 293,
488.]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid._, p. 591.]

Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in the
facts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguely
conceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for all
the unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circumstances. She
gives it a surprising range of creative power. It has created
everything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, there
is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the
reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the
first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality
which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape
at any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism.
Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through
endless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a moment
accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what s