This page has been validated.
418
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

in matter; and you will find it easier for mind to destroy, and to enjoy health yourself, and help others to do so. The basis of all disease, is error or belief; destroy the belief and the sick will recover. To be cheerful in sickness is well, to be hopeful is better, but to understand the nothingness of disease destroys it utterly. An invalid is a deplorable instance of mesmerism, with which one belief controls another, and error re-produces error. We admit one mind can control another mind, and thereby control the body, but never calculate we do this daily with our own body. The mesmerizer causes his subject pain without any physical cause, proving he produces this sensation through the subject's belief, and not that it existed in the body; then, to the belief of pain were he to add a belief of disease in any part, and keep up this state of mind sufficiently long, the disease would certainly appear there. The mesmerizer makes a limb rigid by making his subject believe he cannot move it. Thus it is with the sick; they mesmerize their bodies unconsciously, through their beliefs, to conditions of stiffened joints, disease, and death, and the only difference is, the cause in one instance, is understood to be mind, or belief, producing the results, and in the other case, believed to be matter; hence mind is employed to remove one, and matter the other condition, whereas both have their origin in mind, and are removed through mind. The lame man mesmerizes his body through the belief an accident or disease caused him lameness, and so long as this belief lasts, his lameness continues.

Sometimes faith in medicine, or the lapse of time wears away fear to such an extent the belief changes