Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/479

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TEACHING CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.
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ing mental anatomy, discerns and deals with the real cause of disease. The material physician gropes among phenomena which fluctuate every instant, under influences not embraced in his diagnosis; and so he stumbles and falls in the darkness.

Teacher and student should also be familiar with the obstetrics taught by this Science. To attend properly Obstetrics. the birth of the new child, or the divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe. Though gathering new energies, an idea should injure none of its useful surroundings, in the travail of spiritual birth. It should not have within it a single element of error, and should remove properly whatever is offensive. Then would the new idea, conceived and born of Truth and Love, be clad in white garments. Its beginning will be meek, its growth sturdy, and its maturity undecaying. When this new birth takes place, the Christian Science infant is born of the Spirit, and can cause the mother no more suffering. Thus will it always be, when Truth is allowed to fulfil her perfect work.

To decide quickly as to the proper treatment of error, — whether it be manifested in forms of sickness, sin, Decision. or death, — is the first step towards destroying it. Our Master treated it through Mind. He never enjoined obedience to the laws of Nature, if by that is meant laws of matter, nor did he use drugs. There is a law of God applicable to healing, and it is a spiritual law instead of material. The sick are not healed by inanimate matter or drugs only, as they believe they are, and this is a mental action or causation.