Chapter 9: “The Only Incentive Of A Mistaken Sense”

WHOSO READETH LET HIM UNDERSTAND - Chapter 9.

“THE ONLY INCENTIVE
OF
A MISTAKEN SENSE”

MARY BAKER EDDY

IN AN article entitled “The Way of Wisdom,” published in Miscellany, Mrs. Eddy makes a statement that should, in the words of an old saying, rouse the living and wake the dead. It is this. “The only incentive of a mistaken sense is malicious animal magnetism,—the name for all evil—and this must be understood.”
This quotation must be recognized as meaning that there is not a single wrong action taking place in the entire range of human affairs and beliefs, from the simplest to the most important, that is not the result of the directed action of malicious mind.
Could any statement be more comprehensive? And yet you would know it to be true even if

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Mrs. Eddy had not said it; for you know that your only cognizance of anything is a mental cognizance and not a matter one, and that therefore everything has to come as consciousness to you, which means it comes as a mind argument and not a matter argument since matter cannot argue. Therefore, a wrong argument or incentive must come from the negation of God, which is malicious animal magnetism.
Then you see that with any mistaken sense—wrong action—you are always dealing with malicious animal magnetism, in other words malicious mental malpractice acting as malicious minds. It could not be otherwise. Why not acknowledge such a self-evident truth and act accordingly, instead of drifting along, dealing with beliefs that have nothing to do with the case and virtually making no progress?
Either here or hereafter every problem will have to be worked out on these lines, for there is no other way to overcome evil. Death will not change evil, and neither will the hereafter have an easier or better way of applying the truth to the lie.
Mrs. Eddy has clearly stated this in an article entitled Life, which appeared in the Christian Science Sentinel Feb. 2, 1918. She wrote, “Death cannot advance our joy, nor make us

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wiser, better, or more pure. The Science of all being must be learned ere this is won. Bliss is not the boon of one brief moment. After the veil has dropped, we have to learn the same as now our way to heaven, by slow and solemn footsteps, for no man cometh to the Father but through Truth and Love.”

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