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GOD AND MAN
331

my acts have as much restriction over my life as they have over the well.

I will here say a word or two which the well must take as an opinion but which the sick will admit as a truth. The sick are imprisoned for their belief; the imprisonment is what they suffer. When I come in contact with them they affect me not in the way one man of opinion affects another. Their language is different. The well speak in my own tongue, but the sick cannot do that for the language of the well cannot describe the feeling of the sick. Thus they are prisoners in their own land, among strangers and not understood.

4. I will illustrate the manner in which the sick express themselves. Ideas or thoughts are matter or opinions. These opinions are in the world of matter and our senses or life are attached to our belief or opinion. As opinions are something believed and admitted they become matter according to the wisdom of the world. Thus the priests invent creeds with penalties attached to their disobedience and the doctors invent diseases with other penalties. The teachers of the young are instructed to establish the sayings of the priests and doctors in the children's minds. Now everyone knows if he will stop and think that if a child when it is first born is given to the savages it will grow up one and with all the peculiarities of one, or nearly so; this proves that the life of the child is attached to the belief of the savage and the child has become subject to its teachers. In the same way religion or belief in another world is binding on the child and the penalties of the doctors' belief are also binding. Suppose you bring the same child into our country at the age of a man, will anyone say or believe that he is bound in his conscience to obey the laws of our priests and doctors? I think not. This then shows that the child's mind or wisdom can be moulded into a savage and if this can be done it will not require a great stretch of imagination to make a disease. Just admit this child's mind as matter. According to common belief every form of matter can make a shadow according to its identity or description. For instance, consumption is a belief, this belief is matter and throws off a shadow. As life is in the senses and the senses are in the mind or matter, they are all associated together; here is where the mistake lies.

I will make an illustration to show where the mind affects