Unity of Good
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| Unity of Good |
Mary Baker Eddy’s Unity of Good is one of her lesser-known but deeply theological works, published in 1889. It’s not a long book, but it’s dense with metaphysical argument. She explores questions like: Does God perceive sin? Is matter real? What is the nature of divine law compared to human perception?
- Does God know sin? — Eddy argues that God, being infinite good, cannot behold or acknowledge sin, since sin is unreal in divine reality.
- Seedtime and harvest — She uses biblical metaphors to show how spiritual law governs outcomes, not material sense.
- The things of God — A meditation on how divine ways are “higher than our ways,” emphasizing spiritual understanding over human reasoning.
- Is matter real? — One of her central questions: she insists matter is an illusion of the senses, while Spirit is the only reality.
- Unity of Good — The title essay, where she insists that God is indivisible, wholly good, and that evil has no true existence.
📖 Key idea: Eddy’s metaphysics rests on the radical claim that sin, sickness, and death are not realities but false perceptions.
For her, the “unity of good” means that God is all, and therefore evil is nothing. This is consistent with her broader Christian Science teaching.
Excerpts From the chapter one
Perhaps no doctrine of Christian Science arouses 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 3:16). 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 are 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 1:13); but they also declare that God pitieth them who fear Him, that there is no place where His voice is not heard, and 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.