Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/409

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Christian Science Practice
393

pleasure must come through mind, and like a watchman forsaking his post, we admit the intruding belief, forgetting that through divine help we can forbid this entrance.

The body seems to be self-acting, only because mortal mind is ignorant of itself, of its own actions, and of their The strength of Spirit results, — ignorant that the predisposing, remote, and exciting cause of all bad effects is a law of so-called mortal mind, not of matter. Mind is the master of the corporeal senses, and can conquer sickness, sin, and death. Exercise this God-given authority. Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.

Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs, and that in Science man reflects God's government. No pain in matter Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation. Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than the trunk of a tree which you gash or the electric wire which you stretch, were it not for mortal mind.

When Jesus declares that “the light of the body is the eye,” he certainly means that light depends upon Mind, not upon the complex humors, lenses, muscles, the iris and pupil, constituting the visual organism.

Man is never sick, for Mind is not sick and matter No real disease cannot be. A false belief is both the tempter and the tempted, the sin and the sinner, the disease and its cause. It is well to be calm in sickness;