he calls the
divine Mind; indeed she says in substance that God is not conscious of
it at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page
243.)

God is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsible
for, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mind
cannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible for
physical and moral disasters" (page 119). God did not create matter (the
Father mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter means
pain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to the
order of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy's
scheme of a true idealism. Man is "God's spiritual idea" and since he
belongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrow
nor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as he
admits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent of
another system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which is
never really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escape
from the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. For
all the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believe
in it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be.

It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whose
beginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of the
revelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age by
the untaught or the misled. For example, Arsenic is not a poison, so we
are told again and again. It is only a poison because people think it
is;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, it
continues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it is
now and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind upon
mind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues to
believe it to be. Directly we all believe that Arsenic is not a poison
it will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind.
Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it.
"By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind
mortals to sickness, sin and death." And so on at great length and
almost endless repetition.

[Footnote 36: Page 178.]

_The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System_

Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and since
matter is apparently t