One whom I rescued from seeming spiritual oblivion, in which the senses had engulfed him, said to me: —
I should have died, but for the glorious Principle you teach, — supporting the power of Mind over the body, and showing me the nothingness of the so-called pleasures and pains of sense. The treatises I had read and the medicines I had taken only abandoned me to more hopeless suffering and despair. Adherence to hygiene was useless. The mind needed to be set right. The ailment was not bodily, but mental, and I was cured when I learned my way in Christian Science.
Admitting the common hypothesis, that food is requisite to sustain human life, there follows the necessity for another admission, in the opposite direction, — namely, that food has power to destroy life, through its deficiency or excess, in quality or quantity. This is a specimen of the ambiguous character of all material health-theories. They are self-contradictory and self-destructive, — “a kingdom divided against itself, that is brought to desolation.” If food preserves life, it cannot destroy it.
The truth is, food does not affect the life of man; and this becomes self-evident, when we learn that God is our only Life. Because sin and sickness are not qualities of Soul, or Life, we have hope in immortality; but it would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating, until we gain more goodness, and a clearer comprehension of the living God. In that perfect day of understanding, we shall neither eat to live, nor live to eat.
We cannot deny that Life is self-sustained; and we should never deny the everlasting harmony of Soul, simply because, to the senses, there is seeming discord.
