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HEALING THE SICK.
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that convinces us of this fact, and until this proof is made, you cannot be safe. Conversing on disease, reading, or thinking about it, should be sedulously avoided. If doctors knew one half the harm done by medical books they would abandon works on disease, and never speak again of sickness to their patients. Thinking of disease and pointing out its character makes it liable to appear on the body; such conversations or ruminations should be repugnant as obscene thoughts or words.

Mind engenders all disease, in which case your only hope lies in thinking and hearing less about it, or in understanding the science that absolutely prevents it. When you employ a material remedy you must have more faith in it than the disease, and believe you are getting cured with more tenacity than you believe you are growing worse, that the balance of your faith in recovery or the remedy, may restore you; this condition of mind, neutralizing the effects of your fear, relieves the body. The whole is a mental operation, and matter has nothing to do with it.

The mortal body is but a phenomenon of mortal belief. Watch, then, mind more, and the body less. In case of sickness, or sin, to destroy the one, or remedy the other, we should begin in mind instead of matter; “pluck the beam out of our own eye, that we may see clearly to cast the mote out of our brother's eye.” Unless we are rid of blindness ourself, we are the blind leading the blind, whereby both fall into the ditch.

The study of materia medica, physiology, etc., should give place to metaphysical research, whereby we gain an insight into the power mind holds over matter.