Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898)/02 Physiology
CHAPTER II.
PHYSIOLOGY.
Therefore I say unto you: Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
He sent His word and healed them, and delivered them from their
destructions. — Psalms.
PHYSIOLOGY is one of the apples from the Tree of
Knowledge. Error declared that eating this fruit
would open man's eyes, and make him as a God. Instead
of so doing, it closes mortal eyes to man's God-given
dominion over the earth.
To measure intellectual capacity by the size of the brain, and estimate strength by the exercise of muscle, Man not structural. is to subjugate intelligence, make mind mortal and place this mind at the mercy of material organization and non-intelligence.
Obedience to the so-called physical laws of health has not checked sickness. Diseases have multiplied, since man-made theories have taken the place of primitive Truth.
You say that indigestion, fatigue, sleeplessness, cause Causes of sickness. distressed stomachs and aching heads. Then you consult your brain, in order to remember what has hurt you, when your remedy lies in forgetting the whole thing; for matter has no sensation, and the human mind is all that can produce pain.
“As a man thinketh, so is he.” Mind is all that feels, acts, or impedes action. Ignorant of this, or shrinking from its implied responsibility, the healing effort is made on the wrong side, and thus the conscious control over the body is lost.
The Mohammedan believes in a pilgrimage to Mecca for the salvation of his soul. The popular doctor Pills and pilgrimages. believes in his recipe, and the druggist believes in the power of his prescription to save a man's life. The first is a religious delusion; the second is a medical delusion.
The human mind is inharmonious in itself. From this arises the inharmoniousness of the body. To ignore Health from reliance on spirituality. God as of little use in sickness is a mistake. Instead of thrusting Him aside in times of bodily trouble, and waiting for the hour of strength in which to acknowledge Him, we should learn that He can do everything for us in sickness as in health.
Failing to recover health through adherence to physiology and hygiene, the despairing invalid often drops them, and turns, in his extremity, and only as a last resort, to God. His faith in Him is less than it was in drugs, air, and exercise, or he would have resorted to Mind first. The balance of power is conceded to be with matter, by most of the medical systems; but when Spirit at last asserts its mastery, then, and not before is man found to be harmonious and immortal.
Should we implore a corporeal God to heal the sick out of His personal volition? or should we understand the infinitely divine Principle which heals? If we rise no higher than blind faith, the Science of healing is not attained, and Soul-existence, in the place of sense-existence, is not comprehended. We apprehend Life in Science, only as we live above corporeal sense, and correct it. Our proportionate admission of the claims of Good or evil determines the harmony of our existence, — our health, our longevity, and our Christianity.
We cannot serve two masters, nor reach Divine Science through material sense. Drugs and hygiene cannot The two masters. successfully usurp the place and power of the source of all health and perfection. If man is constituted both good and evil, he must end in evil. An error in the premises must appear in the conclusion. To avail yourself of the power of Spirit, you must renounce all erroneous inventions.
The “flesh lusteth against the Spirit.” They can no more unite in action, than good can coincide with evil. Half-way success. It is not wise to take a halting and half-way position, or to expect to work equally with Truth and error. There is but one way — namely, God and His idea — which leads to spiritual Life. The Scientific government of the body must be attained through Mind. It is impossible to gain control over it in any other way. On this fundamental point timid conservatism is absolutely inadmissible. Only through radical reliance on Truth can healing power be realized.
Substituting good words for a good life, fair seeming for straightforward character, is a poor shift for the weak and worldly, who think the standard of Christian Science too high for them.
If the scales are evenly adjusted, the removal of a single weight from either gives preponderance to the opposite. Whatever influence you cast on the side of Belief on the wrong side. matter, you take away from Mind, which would otherwise outweigh all else. Your belief militates against your health, when it ought to be enlisted on the side of health. When sick (according to belief) you rush after drugs, search out the so-called laws of health, and depend on these to heal you, though you have already brought yourself into the slough of disease through just this false dependence.
Because man-made systems insist that man becomes sick and useless, suffers and dies, all in consonance with The divine authority. the laws of God, are we to believe it? Are we to believe an authority which denies God's spiritual command relating to perfection, — authority which Jesus has proved to be false? He did the will of the Father. He healed sickness, in defiance of what is called material law, but in accordance with God's law.
I have discerned disease in the human mind, and recognized the patient's fear of it, many weeks before the Disease foreseen. so-called disease made its appearance in the body. Disease being a belief, — a latent illusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if this error was met and destroyed by Truth.
Here let a word be introduced which may be frequently used hereafter, — chemicalization. By Changed mentality. chemicalization I mean the process which mortal mind and body undergo in the change of belief from a material to a spiritual basis.
Whenever an aggravation of symptoms has occurred, through mental chemicalization, I have seen the mental signs, assuring me that danger was over, before the patient felt the change; and I have said to the patient, Health prognosticated. “You are healed,” — sometimes to his discomposure, when he was incredulous; but it always came about as I had foretold.
I name these facts to show that disease has a mental origin, — that faith in rules of health or in drugs begets and fosters disease, by attracting the mind to the subject of sickness, by exciting fear of it, and by dosing the body in order to avoid it. The faith reposed in these things should find stronger supports and a higher home. Understanding the control of Mind over body, we should put no faith in material means.
Science not only reveals the origin of all disease as wholly mental, but it also declares that all disease is Mind as the healer. cured by Mind. There can be no healing except by Mind, however much we trust the drug, or any other means toward which human faith is directed. It is Mind, not matter, which brings to the sick whatever good they may seem to receive from drugs. The sick are never really healed, except by means of divine power. It is only the action of Truth that can restore harmony.
Whatever teaches man to have other rulers, and acknowledge other power than the divine Mind, is Theogony. anti-Christian. The good that matter seems to do is evil, for it robs man of God, omnipotent Mind. Truth is not the basis of Theogony. Modes of matter form neither a moral nor a spiritual system. The discord which calls for them is the result of the exercise of full faith in matter, instead of Spirit.
Did Jesus understand the economy of man less than Graham or Cutter? Christian ideas certainly embrace — Physiologists. what human theories exclude — the Principle or man's harmony, the text, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” not only contradicts human systems, but points to the self-sustaining and eternal Truth.
The demands of Truth are spiritual, and reach the body through Mind. The best interpreter of man's needs said: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink.”
If there are material laws which prevent disease, what then causes it? Not divine law, for Christ healed the sick and cast out error, always in opposition, never in obedience, to physics.
Causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others it relates to human Causation the main question. progress. The age seems ready to approach this subject, to ponder somewhat the supremacy of Spirit, and at least touch the hem of its garment.
The description of man as purely physical, or as both material and spiritual, — but in either case dependent on his physical organization, — is the Pandora box, from which many evils have gone forth, especially despair. Matter, which takes divine power into its own hands, and claims to be a creator, is a fiction, in which debauchery becomes attuned to such fascination that mankind has caught its moral contagion.
Through discernment of the spiritual opposite of materiality, even the way through Christ, Truth, Paradise regained. man will reopen, with the key of Science, the gates of Paradise which human beliefs have closed, and will find himself unfallen, upright, pure, and free, not needing to consult almanacs for the probabilities of Life, or to study brainology in order to learn how much of a man he is.
Mind's control over the universe, including man, is no longer an open question, but is demonstrable Science; A closed question. Jesus illustrated the divine Principle and practice of immortal Mind, by healing sickness and sin, and destroying the foundations of death.
Mistaking his origin and nature, man believes himself to be combined matter and Spirit, — that Spirit is sifted The nerves not Spirit. through matter, carried on a nerve, exposed to ejection by the operation of matter. Think of it! The intellectual, the moral, the spiritual, — yea, Mind, — subjected to non-intelligence!
No more sympathy exists between the flesh and Spirit than between Christ and Belial.
The so-called laws of matter are nothing but false beliefs in the presence of Intelligence and Life where Mind is not. This is the procuring cause of all disease. The opposite Truth — that Intelligence and Life are spiritual, never material — cures all disease.
The fundamental error lies in the supposition that man is a material outgrowth, and that the cognizance of good or evil, which he has through the bodily senses, constitutes his happiness or misery.
Theorizing about man's development from mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men. Evolution. amounts to nothing in the right direction, and very much in the wrong.
Materialism grades the human species as rising from the dust upward; but how is the material species maintained when man passes through what we call death and the Rubicon of spirituality? Spirit can form no real link in this supposed chain of material being, but reveals the eternal chain as uninterrupted and wholly spiritual; yet this can be realized only as the discordant sense of Being disappears.
If man was first a material being, he must have passed through all the forms of matter, in order to become man. Degrees of development. If the material body is man, he is mere matter, or dust. On the contrary, man is the image and likeness of Spirit; and the belief that there is Soul in sense, or Life in matter, belongs to mortal mind, to which the Apostle refers, when he says we must “put off the old man.”
What is man? Brain, heart, blood, the material structure? If the real man is in the material body, Identity not lost. you take away a portion of the man when you amputate a limb; the surgeon destroys manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb, or injury to a tissue, is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more nobility than the statuesque athlete, — teaching us, by his very deprivations, that “a man 's a man, for a' that.”
When we admit that matter (heart, blood, brain, acting through the five physical senses) constitutes man, Human progress. we fail to see how anatomy can distinguish between humanity and the brute, or determine when man is really man, and has progressed farther than his progenitors.
The theory that Spirit is distinct from matter, but must pass through it, or into it, to be Individualization. individualized, reduces Truth to the dependency of error, and requires the sensible to be made manifest through the insensible.
What is termed matter manifests nothing but a material mentality. Not a glimpse or manifestation of Spirit is obtainable through matter. Spirit is positive. Matter is its supposed opposite, the absence of Spirit. For positive Spirit to pass through a negative condition would be its destruction.
Anatomy declares man to be structural. Physiology continues this explanation, measuring human strength Man not structural. by bones and sinews, and human life by material law. Man is spiritual, individual, and eternal; material structure is mortal.
Phrenology makes man knavish or honest, according Phrenology. to the development of the cranium; but anatomy, physiology, phrenology, do not define the image of God, the real immortal man.
Human reason and religion come slowly to the A slow growth. recognition of spiritual facts, and so continue to call upon matter to remove the error which the human mind alone has created.
The idols of civilization are far more fatal to health and longevity than the idols of barbarism. They call into action less faith than Buddhism, in a supreme governing Intelligence. The Esquimaux restore health by incantations, as effectually as civilized practitioners by their more studied methods.
Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air? Nothing is able to do so much for man as he can do for himself, with omnipotent aid.
The footsteps of thought, as they pass higher from material standpoints, are slow, and portend a long night Rise of thought. to the traveller; but the angels of His presence — the spiritual intuitions that tell us when “the night is far spent, the day is at hand” are our guardians in the gloom. Whosoever opens the way in Christian Science is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn.
The voices of Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount are pursuing and will overtake the ages, rebuking in their course all error, and proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Truth is revealed. It only needs to be practised.
Belief is all that ever enables a drug to cure mortal ailments. Anatomy admits that mind is somewhere in Medical errors. man, though out of sight. Then, if one is sick, why treat the body alone, while we administer a dose of despair to the mind? Why declare that the body is diseased, and picture this disease to the mind, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel, and holding it before the thought of both physician and patient? We should understand that the cause of disease rests in the mortal human mind, and its cure with the immortal divine Mind. We should prevent the images of disease from taking form in thought, and we should efface the outlines of disease already formulated in mortal mind.
When there are fewer doctors, and less thought is Novel diseases. given to sanitary subjects, there will be better constitutions and less disease. In old times who ever heard of dyspepsia, cerebro-spinal meningitis, hay-fever, and rose-cold?
What an abuse of natural beauty to say that a rose, the smile of God, can produce suffering! The joy of its presence, its beauty, and purity should uplift the thought, and destroy any possible fever. It is profane to fancy that the sweetness of clover and the breath of new-mown hay may cause glandular inflammation, sneezing, and nasal pangs.
If a random thought, calling itself Dyspepsia, had tried to tyrannize over our forefathers, it would have been Ancestral dyspepsia. routed by their independence and industry. Then people had less time for selfishness, coddling, and sickly after-dinner talk. The exact amount of food the stomach could digest was not discussed à la Cutter, or referred to sanitary laws. A man's belief in those days was not so severe upon the gastric juices. Beaumont's Medical Experiments did not govern the digestion.
Damp atmosphere and freezing snow empurpled the plump cheeks of our ancestors; but they never indulged Pulmonary misbeliefs. in the refinement of inflamed bronchial tubes, because they were as ignorant as Adam, before he ate the fruit of false knowledge, of the existence of such things as tubes and troches, lungs and lozenges.
“Where ignorance is bliss, 't is folly to be wise,” says the English poet; and there is truth in his sentiments Our modern Eves. The action of mortal mind on the body was not so injurious before inquisitive modern Eves took up the study of medical works, and unmanly Adams attributed their own downfall, and the fate of their offspring, to the weakness of their wives.
The primitive custom of taking no thought about food, left the stomach and bowels free to act in obedience to nature, and gave the Gospel a chance to be seen in its glorious effects upon the body. A ghastly array of diseases was not paraded before the imagination. There were fewer books on digestion, and more “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the Divine Mind, selfishness and sin, disease and death, will lose their foothold.
Human fear of miasma would load with disease the Eden. air of Eden, and weigh down mankind with superimposed and conjectural evils. Mortal mind is the worst foe of the body, while divine Mind is its best friend.
Should all cases of organic disease be treated by a regular practitioner, and the Christian Scientist try his Diseases not to be classified. hand only on cases of hysteria, hypochondria, and hallucination? One disease is no more real than another. All disease is the result of education, and can carry its ill-effects no further than mortal mind maps out the way. Christian Science heals organic disease as well as functional. It finds that decided types of acute disease are quite as ready to yield to Truth as the less distinct type and chronic form of disease. It handles the most malignant contagion with perfect assurance.
Human mind produces what is termed organic disease as certainly as it produces hysteria, and it must One basis of all sickness. relinquish all its errors, sicknesses, and sins. I have demonstrated this beyond all cavil. The evidence of divine Mind's healing power and absolute control is to me as certain as the evidence of my existence.
Mortal mind and body are one. Neither exists with out the other, and both must be changed by immortal Mental and physical oneness. Mind. Mortal matter, or body, is but a false concept of mortal mind. It builds its own superstructure, of which the material body is the grosser and more basal portion; but from first to last, this body is only a material and sensuous belief.
In the Scriptural allegory of material creation, Adam, error, which represents the erroneous theory of Life The effect of names. and intelligence in matter — had the naming of all material animals. These names indicated their properties, qualities, and forms. Thus error, the opposite of Truth, names the qualities and effects of what it terms matter, and so creates the law of belief, which holds the preponderance of power in human opinions, against Spirit and Truth.
If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake, and the patient dies, even though physician and patient are Poison. expecting favorable results, does belief, you ask, cause this death? Even so, and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken. In such cases a few persons believe the potion swallowed by the patient to be harmless; but the vast majority of mankind, though they know nothing of this particular case and this special person, believe the arsenic, the strychnine, or whatever the drug used, to be poisonous, for it has been set down as a poison by mortal mind. The consequence is that the result is controlled by the majority of opinions outside, not by the infinitesimal minority of opinions in the sick-chamber.
The remote cause, or belief, is not more dangerous, because of its priority, and the connection of past mortal thoughts with present, — than the predisposing and exciting cause.
Perhaps an adult has a deformity, produced, thirty years ago, by the terror of his mother. That chronic Deformity. error is more difficult of cure than an acute injury, unless we wrest it from mortal mind, and base the cure on Science, or immortal Mind, to which all things are possible.
Mortal mind, acting from the basis of sensuous belief in matter, is animal magnetism; but mortal mind, Animal magnetism destroyed. contradicting itself, must finally yield to the divine Mind, expressed in Science. In proportion as we understand Christian Science, we are freed from animal magnetism; and we disarm sin of its imaginary power, in proportion as we gain this spiritual understanding.
Ignorant of the methods and the basis of metaphysical healing, you may attempt to unite with it hypnotism, spiritualism, electricity; but neither of these methods can be mingled with metaphysical healing.
Whosoever reaches the understanding of Christian Science, in its higher significations, will Sudden cures. perform the sudden cures of which it is capable; but this can be done only by taking up the cross, and following Christ in the daily life.
Science can heal the sick who are absent from their healer, as well as the present, since space is no obstacle to Mind. Immortal Mind heals what eye Absent patients. hath not seen; but the spiritual capacity to apprehend thought, so as to heal by the Truth-power, is gained only in proportion as man is found, not wearing his own righteousness, but reflecting the divine nature.
Every medical method has its advocates. The preference of mortal mind for any method creates a demand Horses mistaught. for that method, and the body then seems to require such treatment. You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will take cold without his blanket; whereas the wild animal, left to his instincts, sniffs the wind with delight. The epizoötic is a humanly evolved ailment, which a wild horse might never have.
Treatises on anatomy, physiology, and health, sustained by what is termed material law, are Medical works. the promoters of sickness and disease. It is proverbial, that as long as you read medical works you will be sick.
The sedulous matron — studying her Jahr, with homœopathic pellet and powder in hand, ready to put you into a sweat, to move the bowels, or to produce sleep — is sowing the seed of sickness day and night, and her household will erelong reap the reward of this error.
Descriptions of disease, given by physicians, and advertisements of quackery, are both prolific sources of sickness. As mortal mind is the chief husbandman of error, it should be taught to do the body no harm, and to unweave its own webs.
The patient sufferer tries to be satisfied when he sees Invalid's outlook. his would-be healers busy, and his faith in their efforts is somewhat helpful to them and himself; but in Science one must understand the resuscitating law of Life. This is the seed within itself, bearing fruit after its kind, spoken of in Genesis.
Physicians generally deport themselves as if Mind were non-existent; and they may even take the ground, contrary to metaphysics, that all is matter, not Mind. Ignorant that the human mind governs the body, through belief, the invalid may unwittingly add more fear to the reservoir already overflowing with that emotion.
Doctors should not implant disease in the thoughts of their patients, as they so frequently do, by declaring Wrong and right way. it a fixed fact, even before they go to work to eradicate the disease, through the material faith which they inspire. Instead of furnishing mortal thought with fear, they should try to correct this turbulent element of mortal mind, by the influence of that loving Truth which casteth out fear.
When man is governed by Spirit, the ever-present God who understands all things, man knows that to Spirit all things are possible. The only road to this affluence of Truth, which heals the sick, is found in the Divine Mind and Divine Science.
To reduce inflammation, dissolve a tumor, or cure organic disease, I have found Divine Mind more potent The important decision. than all lower remedies. And why not, since this Mind is the source and condition of all existence? Before deciding that stomach or head is disordered, one should ask, “Who art thou that repliest to Spirit? Can matter speak for itself, or does it hold the issues of Life?” Pain and pleasure have no partnership with matter, which can neither suffer nor enjoy; but mortal belief has such a partnership.
When you manipulate patients, you trust in electricity and magnetism more than in Truth; and for that reason Manipulation. you employ matter rather than Mind. You weaken or destroy your power, if you resort to any except spiritual means.
It is foolish to say that you manipulate patients, but that you lay no stress on that manipulation. If this be so, why manipulate them? Really you do so because you are ignorant of the baneful effects of magnetism, or are not sufficiently spiritual to depend on Spirit. In this case you must improve your mental condition till you finally attain the understanding of Christian Science.
If you are too material to love the Science of Mind, and are satisfied with good words instead of deeds, if Not words but deeds. you adhere to error and are afraid to trust Truth, the question then recurs, “Adam, where art thou?” It is unnecessary to resort to aught besides Mind, in order to satisfy the sick that you are doing something for them; for if they are cured, they generally know it, and are satisfied.
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” If you have more faith in drugs than in Truth, this faith will incline you to the side of matter and error. Any hypnotic power you may exercise will diminish your ability to become a Scientist, and vice versa. The act of healing the sick through Mind alone, of casting out error with Truth, shows your position as a Christian.
The demands of God appeal to thought only; but the claims of mortality, and what are termed laws of nature, Physiology or Spirit. appertain to matter. Which, then, are we to accept as legitimate, and capable of producing the highest human good? We cannot obey both physiology and Spirit; for one is opposed to the other, and insists upon supremacy in the affections. It is impossible to work from two standpoints. If we attempt it, we shall presently “hold to the one and despise the other.”
Mortal beliefs are antagonistic to, and cannot mix with Science. This is clear to those who heal the sick on the basis of Science alone.
Mind's government of the body must supersede the so-called laws of matter. Obedience to material law True law. prevents full obedience to spiritual law, — the law which overcomes material conditions, and puts matter under the feet of Mind. Mortals entreat God to restore the sick to health, and forthwith shut out the aid of Spirit, by using material means, thus working against themselves and their prayers, and denying man's God-given ability to demonstrate Mind's sacred power. Pleas for medicine and the laws of health come from mortal ignorance of Science and its transcendent power.
To admit that sickness is a condition over which God has no control, is to presuppose that omnipotent power is powerless on some occasions. The law of Christ, or Truth, finds all things possible to Spirit; but the so-called laws of matter find Spirit of no avail, and demand obedience to materialistic codes, thus departing from the basis of Divine Science. To suppose that God constitutes laws of discord is a mistake; for discords have no support from divine law, however much may be said to the contrary.
Can the agriculturist, according to belief, ever produce a crop without sowing the seed, and awaiting its germination according to the laws of God? Yet the Scriptures inform us that sin, or error, first caused the condemnation of man to till the ground. Obedience to Truth will remove this necessity. Truth never made error necessary, or devised a law to perpetuate it.
The supposed laws which result in discord and weariness are not His laws, for the legitimate and only Laws of nature. possible action of Truth is the production of harmony. Laws of nature are laws of Spirit; but men commonly recognize as law that which annuls the power of Spirit. Divine Mind rightly demands man's entire obedience, affection, and strength. No reservation is made for any lesser loyalty. Obedience to Truth gives man power and strength. Submission to error superinduces loss of power.
Truth casts out all evils and materialistic methods with the actual spiritual law, — the law which gives sight Our belief and understanding. to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the dumb, feet to the lame. If Christian Science dishonors human belief, it honors divine Understanding; and the One Mind only is entitled to honor.
The so-called laws of health are simply laws of mortal belief. The premises being erroneous, the conclusions are wrong. Truth makes no laws to regulate sickness, sin, and death, for these are unknown to Truth.
Belief produces the results of belief; and the penalties it affixes last as long as the belief, and are inseparable from it. The remedy lies in probing the trouble to the bottom, in finding and casting out by denial the error of belief which produces a mortal disorder, and never honoring it with the title of law, or yielding obedience to it. Truth, Life, and Love are the only legitimate and eternal demands on man, and they are spiritual law-givers, enforcing obedience through divine sanctions.
Controlled by the divine Intelligence, man is harmonious and eternal. Whatever is governed by human Broken laws. belief is discordant and mortal. We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of Being, for matter cannot suffer. Mortal mind alone suffers, — not because a law of matter has been transgressed, but because a law of this mind has been disobeyed. I have demonstrated this as a rule of Divine Science by destroying the delusion of suffering from what is termed a broken physical law.
A lady, whom I cured of consumption, always breathed with great difficulty when the wind was east. I sat silently by her side a few moments. Her breath came gently. The inspirations were deep and natural. I then requested her to look at the weather-vane. She looked, and saw that it pointed due east. The wind had not changed, but her difficult breathing was gone. The wind had not produced it. My metaphysical treatment changed the action of her belief on the system, and she never suffered again from east winds.
Here is testimony on this subject:
of many, of Mrs. Eddy's skill in metaphysical healing. At Childbirth. the birth of my youngest child, now eight years old, I thought my approaching confinement was premature by several weeks, and sent her a message to that efffect. Without seeing me, she returned answer that the proper time had come, and that she would be with me immediately. Slight labor-pains had commenced before she arrived. She stopped them at once, and requested me to call an accoucheur, but to keep him below stairs until after the birth. When the doctor arrived, and while he remained in a lower room, Mrs. Eddy came to my bedside. I asked her how I should lie. She answered, “It makes no difference how you lie,” and added, “Now let the child be born.” Immediately the birth took place, and without a pain. The doctor was then called into the room to receive the child, and he saw that I had no pain whatever. My sister, Dorcas B. Rawson, of Lynn, was present when my babe was born, and will testify to the facts as I have stated them. I confess my own astonishment. I did not expect so much, even from Mrs. Eddy, especially as I had suffered before very severely in childbirth. The physician covered me with extra bed-clothes, charged me to be very careful about taking cold and to keep quiet, and then went away. I think he was alarmed at my having no labor-pains, but before he went out I had an ague coming on. When the door closed behind him, Mrs. Eddy threw off the extra coverings and said, “It is nothing but the fear produced by the doctor which causes these chills.” They left me at once. She told me to sit up when I chose, and to eat whatever I wanted. My babe was born about two o'clock in the morning, and the following evening I sat up several hours. I ate whatever the family did. I had a boiled dinner of meat and vegetables the second day. I made no difference in my diet, except to drink gruel between meals, and never experienced the least inconvenience from this course. I dressed myself the second day, and the third day felt unwilling to lie down. In one week I was about the house and was well, running up and down stairs and attending to domestic duties. For several years I had been troubled with prolapsus uteri, which disappeared entirely after Mrs. Eddy's wonderful demonstration of Christian Science at the birth of my babe.
Lynn, Mass., 1874.
No system of hygiene but mine is purely mental. Before my book was published other books were in The mortal mind-cure. circulation, which discussed mental medicine and mind-cure, operating through the power of the earth's magnetic currents to regulate life and health. Such theories, and systems of so-called mind-cure which have sprung up since, are as material as the prevailing systems of medicine. They have their birth in mortal mind, which puts forth a human conception in the name of Science, to match the Divine Science of immortal Mind, even as the necromancers of Egypt strove to emulate the wonders wrought by Moses. Such theories have no relationship with Christian Science, which rests on the conception of God as all Life, Substance, and Intelligence, and excludes the human mind as a spiritual factor in the healing work.
Jesus cast out evil and healed the sick, not only without drugs, but without hypnotism, which is the Jesus and hypnotism. opposite of ethical and pathological Truth-power.
Erroneous metaphysical practice may seem for a time to benefit the sick, but the recovery is not permanent. This is because erroneous methods act on and through the material stratum of the human mind, called brain, which is but a mortal consolidation of material mentality and its suppositional activities.
A patient under the influence of mortal mind is healed only by removing the influence on him of this False stimulus. mind, by emptying his thought of the false stimulus and reaction of will-power, and filling it with the divine energies of Truth.
Christian Science destroys material beliefs through the understanding of Spirit, and the thoroughness of this work determines health. Erring human mind-forces can work only evil, under whatever name or pretence they are employed; for Spirit and matter, Good and evil, Light and darkness, cannot mingle.
Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of Good. It is nothing, because it is the absence of something. It is an error, because it presupposes the Evil negative and self-destructive. absence of Truth, when really Truth is omnipresent. Every mortal must learn that there is no power in evil.
Error is self-assertive. It says: “I am a real entity, overmastering Good.” This falsehood should strip error of all pretensions. The only power of evil is to destroy itself. It can never destroy one iota of good. Every attempt of evil to do that is a failure, and only aids in peremptorily punishing the evil doer. If we concede the same reality to discord as to harmony, it has as lasting a claim upon us. If evil is as real as Good, it is as immortal. If death is as real as Life, immortality is a myth. If pain is as real as the absence of pain, both must be immortal; and if so, harmony cannot be the law of Being.
Mortal mind is ignorant of self, or it could never be self-deceived. If it knew how to be better, it would be Ignorant idolatry. better. Since it must believe in something besides itself, it enthrones matter as deity. The human mind has been an idolater from the beginning, having other gods, and believing in more than the One Mind.
As mortals do not comprehend even mortal existence, how ignorant must they be of the all-knowing Mind and His creations.
Here you may see how sense creates its own forms of thought, gives them material names, and then worships and fears them. With pagan blindness it attributes to a material god of medicine an ability beyond itself. The beliefs of the human mind rob and enslave it, and then impute this result to another illusive personification, named Satan.
The valves of the heart, opening and closing for the passage of the blood, obey the mandate of mortal mind Action of mortal mind. as directly as does the hand, moved evidently by the will; though anatomy admits the mental cause of the latter action, but not of the former.
We say, “My hand hath done it.” What is this my but mortal mind, the cause of all materialistic action? All voluntary, as well as miscalled involuntary, action of the mortal body is governed by this mind, not by matter. There is no involuntary action. Mind includes all action and volition, but so-called human mind tries to classify action as voluntary and involuntary.
If you take away this erring mind, the mortal body loses all appearance of life or action, and the human Death and the body. mind then calls it dead; but this human mind still has a body, through which it acts, and which appears to itself to live, — a body like the one it had before death, and which we still see.
What is termed disease does not exist. It is not mind nor matter. The belief of sin, which has grown Embryotic thoughts. terrible in strength and influence, is an unconscious error in the beginning, — an embryotic thought without motive; but afterwards it governs the so-called man. Passion, appetite, dishonesty, envy, and malice ripen into action, only to pass on from shame and woe to their next stage, self-destruction.
The dream of disease is like the dreams we have in sleep, wherein every one recognizes suffering to be Diease a dream. wholly in mortal mind. In both cases the dreamer thinks his body is material, and that the suffering is in that body.
The smile of the sleeper indicates the sensation produced physically by the pleasure of a dream. In the same way pain and pleasure, sickness and care, are traced in unmistakable signs upon the face.
Sickness is a growth of error, springing from man's ignorance of Science. Error rehearses error. What causes disease cannot cure it. The soil of disease is mortal mind, and you have an abundant or scanty crop, according to the seedlings in that soil, unless they are uprooted and cast out.
When darkness comes over the earth, the physical senses have no immediate evidence of a sun. The human Sense yields to faith. eye knows not where the orb of day is, or if it exists. Astronomy gives the desired information. The human senses yield to its authority, and they are willing to leave with astronomy the explanation of the sun's influence over the earth. It the eyes see no sun for a week, we still believe there is solar light and heat. Natural science in this instance raises the thought above its cruder theories, and establishes a higher theory.
In like manner mortals should no more deny the power of Christian Science to establish harmony, and show the effect of mortal mind on the body, — though the cause be unseen, though the belief which reproduces itself is unconscious of its effects, — than they should deny the existence of the sunlight when the orb disappears, or doubt that the sun will reappear.
We call the body material; but it is as truly mortal mind, according to its degree, as the brain which is Ascending the scale. supposed to furnish the evolution of all mortal things. Mortal mind, by an inevitable perversion, makes all things start from the lowest instead of the highest mortal thought. The reverse is the case with all the formations of the immortal Divine Mind. They proceed from the Divine Source; and so, in tracing them, we constantly ascend the scale of infinite Being.
From human belief comes the reproduction of the species, — first inanimate, and then animate mind. Human reproduction. According to mortal thought, the development of embryotic mind commences in the lower, basal thought of mortals, and goes on in an ascending scale by evolution, keeping always in the direct line of matter.
Next we have the formation of embryotic belief, afterwards so-called mortal man. All this while matter is ignorant of itself, ignorant of what it is supposed to produce. The belief saith, an inanimate unconscious seedling is producing both body and mind; and yet mind is not found in brain or elsewhere in matter.
This embryotic and materialistic belief in turn fills Human stature. itself with thoughts of pain and pleasure, of life and death, and arranges itself into five senses, which presently measure belief by the size of a brain, called mind, and the bulk of a body, called matter.
Human birth, growth, maturity, and decay are as the grass springing from the soil, with beautiful green Human frailty. blades, — afterwards to wither and return to its native nothingness. This mortal seeming is temporal, and never merges into immortal being.
The Hebrew bard, when swayed by mortal thoughts, thus swept his lyre with saddening strains about human existence:
| As for man, his days are as grass; |
| As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth; |
| For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. |
| And the place thereof shall know it no more. |
But when hope rose higher in his heart, and he grasped the realities of divine Being, the Psalmist wrote:
| As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness; |
| I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. |
| ....... |
| For with Thee is the fountain of Life; |
| In Thy light shall we see light. |
The brain can give no idea of God's man. It can take no cognizance of Mind. It is not the organ of the infinite Mind.
As mortals give up the delusion that there is more than one Mind, more than one God, His likeness will appear, and the eternal Good will include in that likeness no other element.
As a theoretical life-basis is found to be a misapprehension of existence, the spiritual and divine Principle The manger. of man dawns upon human thought, and leads it to “where the young child lies,” — even to the spiritual idea of Life, and what Life includes.
The whole earth will be transformed by Truth on its pinions of light, chasing away the darkness of error. The human mind must free itself from its self-imposed Spiritual freedom. bondage. It should no longer ask of the head, heart, or lungs: What is man's prospect for life? Mind is not helpless. Intelligence is not mute before non-intelligence.
By its own volition, not a blade of grass springs up, not a spray buddeth within the vale, not a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, not a flower starts from its cloistered cell.
The science of Being reveals man and immortality as based on Spirit. Physical sense defines mortal man as based on matter, and thence infers the mortality of the body.
The physical senses may cherish affinities with their opposites; but in Christian Science, Truth never mingles No physical affinity. with error. Mind has no affinity with matter, and therefore Truth is able to cast out the ills of the flesh. Mind, God, sends forth the aroma of Spirit, the atmosphere of Intelligence. The belief that a pulpy substance under the skull is Mind, is a mockery of Intelligence, the mimicry of Mind.
We are Christian Scientists, only as we quit our reliance upon material things, and grasp the spiritual. We are not Christian Scientists until we leave all for Christ. Mortal beliefs are not spiritual. They come from the hearing of the ear, from corporeality instead cf Principle, and from the mortal instead of the Immortal.
Spirit cannot believe in God. Spirit is God.
Human power is a material belief, a blind force, the Human power. offspring of will and not of Wisdom, of the mortal mind and not of the immortal. It is the headlong cataract, the devouring flame, the tempest's breath. It is lightning and storm, together with all that is selfish, dishonest, and impure.
Moral and spiritual might belong to Spirit, who holds the “wind in His fist;” and this teaching accords The one power. with Science and harmony. You can have no power opposed to God in Science, and the physical senses must give up their false testimony. Your influence for good depends upon the weight you throw into the right scale. The good you do and embody gives you the only power obtainable. Evil is not power. It is a mockery of strength, which ere long betrays its weakness, and falls, never to rise again.
We walk in the footsteps of Truth and Love, by following the example of our Master in the understanding of metaphysics. Christianity is the basis of true healing. Whatever pins our trust to matter, instead of God, is directly opposed to divine power.
I never believed in receiving certificates or presenting testimonials of cures; and usually, when healing, have said to the individual, “Go, and tell no man.” I have never made a specialty of treating disease; but healing has accompanied all my efforts to introduce Christian Science.
The following testimonials are appended, to elucidate my topic:
I was suffering from pulmonary difficulties, pains in the chest, a hard and unremitting cough, hectic fever; and all Pulmonary disease. those fearful symptoms made my case alarming. When I first saw Mrs. Glover (afterwards Mrs. Eddy) I was so reduced as to be unable to walk any distance, and could sit up only a portion of the day. Walking up stairs gave me great suffering in breathing. I had no appetite, and seemed surely going to the grave, the victim of consumption. I had received her attention but a short time when my bad symptoms disappeared, and I regained health. During this time I rode out in storms to visit her, and found the damp weather had no unpleasant effect on me. From my personal experience I am led to believe that the Science by which she not only heals sickness, but explains the way to keep well, is deserving the earnest attention of the community. Her cures are not the result of medicine, spiritualism, or mesmerism, but the application of a Principle that she understands.
East Stoughton, Mass.
Miss Ellen C. Pillsbury, of Tilton, N. H., was suffering
from what her physicians called enteritis, in the
Enteritis.
severest form, following typhoid fever. Her case
was given up by her regular physician, and she was lying at
the point of death, when Mrs. Glover (afterwards Mrs. Eddy)
visited her. In a few moments after Mrs. Glover entered the
room and stood by the bedside, Miss Pillsbury recognized her
aunt, and said, “I am glad to see you, aunty.” In about ten
minutes more Mrs. Glover told her to rise from her bed and
walk. Miss Pillsbury rose, walked seven times across her
room, and then sat down in a chair. For two weeks before
this we had not entered her room without feeling obliged to
step lightly. Her bowels were so tender that she felt the jar,
and it increased her sufferings. She could only be moved
on a sheet from bed to bed. When she walked across the
room, at Mrs. Glover's bidding, Mrs. Glover told Miss Pillsbury
to stamp her foot strongly upon the floor, and she did
so without suffering from it. The next day she was dressed,
and went down to the table; and on the fourth day she made
a journey of about a hundred miles in the cars.
Mr. R. O. Badgely, of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote: “My painful and swollen foot was restored at once on your A foot injured receipt of my letter, and that very day I put on my boot and walked several miles.” He had previously written me: “A stick of timber fell on my foot, from a building, crushing the bones. Cannot you help me? I am sitting in great pain, with my foot in a bath.”
My little son, a year and a half old, had ulcerations of the bowels, and was a great sufferer. He was reduced almost to Sick child. a skeleton, and growing worse daily. He could take nothing but gruel, or some very simple nourishment. At that time the physicians had given him up, saying they could do no more for him, and he was taking laudanum. Mrs. Eddy came in, took him up from the cradle, held him a few minutes, kissed him, laid him down again, and went out. In less than an hour he was taken up, had his playthings, and was well. All his symptoms changed at once. For months previously blood and mucus had passed his bowels, but that day the evacuation was natural, and he has not suffered from his complaint since. He is now well and hearty. The next day after she saw him he ate all he wanted. He even ate a quantity of cabbage just before going to bed.
I was called to visit Mr. Clark, in Lynn, confined to
his bed six months with hip-disease, caused by a fall
upon a wooden spike, when quite a boy. On
Hip-disease.
house I met his physician, who
said he was dying. He had just probed the ulcer on the hip, and said the bone was carious for several inches.
He even showed me the probe, which had on it the
evidence of this condition of the bone. The doctor went
out. Mr. Clark lay with his eyes fixed and sightless.
The dew of death was upon his brow. I went to his
bedside. In a few moments his face changed; its death-pallor
gave place to a natural hue. The eyelids closed
gently and the breathing became natural; he was asleep.
In about ten minutes he opened his eyes and said: “I
feel like a new man. My suffering is all gone.” It was
between three and four o'clock in the afternoon when
this took place.
I told him to rise, dress himself, and take supper with his family. He did so. The next day I saw him in the yard. Since then I have not seen him, but am informed that he went to work in two weeks. The discharge from the sore stopped and it was healed. The disturbance had remained there ever since the injury received in boyhood.
Since his recovery I have been informed that his physician claims to have cured him; and that his mother has been threatened with incarceration in an insane asylum for saying: “It was none other than God and that woman who healed him.” I cannot attest the truth of that report, but what I saw and did for that man, and what his physician said of the case, occurred just as I have narrated.
It has been demonstrated to me that Life is God, and that the might of omnipotent Spirit shares not its strength with matter. Reviewing this brief experience, I cannot fail to discern the coincidence of the spiritual idea with the divine Mind.
A change of belief changes all the physical symptoms, Change of physique. and determines a case for better or worse, Nerves carry a changed report over the body, according to the changed belief.
Destruction of the auditory nerve and paralysis of the optic nerve are not needed to ensure deafness and blindness; for if mortal mind says, “I am deaf and blind,” it will be so without an injured nerve. Every theory opposed to this fact (as I learned in metaphysics) would make man, who is immortal in spiritual understanding, a mortal in material belief.
The authentic history of Kaspar Hauser is a useful hint as to the frailty and inadequacy of mortal mind. Kaspar Hauser. It proves, beyond a doubt, that education constitutes this so-called mind; and that, in turn, mortal mind avenges itself on the body, by the false sense it imparts. Incarcerated in a dungeon, where neither sight nor sound could reach him, at the age of seventeen Kaspar was still a mental infant, crying and chattering with no more intelligence than a babe, and realizing Tennyson's description:
| An infant crying in the night, |
| An infant crying for the light, |
| And with no language but a cry. |
His case proves material sense to be but a belief formed by education alone. The light which affords us joy gave him a belief of intense pain. His eyes were inflamed by the light. To his belief it gave suffering instead of joy. After the babbling boy was taught to speak a few words, he asked to be taken back to his dungeon, and said that he should never be happy anywhere else. Outside of dismal darkness and cold silence he found no peace. Every sound convulsed him with anguish. All that he ate, except his black crust, produced violent retchings. All that gives pleasure to our educated senses gave him pain through those very senses, trained in an opposite direction.
The point for each one to decide is, whether it is mortal mind which is causative, or immortal Useful knowledge. Mind. We should forsake the basis of material belief, for the facts of Science and their Principle.
Whatever furnishes the semblance of an idea, governed by its Principle, furnishes food for thought. Through astronomy, natural history, chemistry, music, mathematics, thought passes naturally from effect to cause.
Learning is useful if it is of the right sort. Historic study, observation, invention, philosophic research, and original thought are requisite for the expansion of mortal mind, and essential to its growth out of itself, error.
It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore, — the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments. Literary arrangements are lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse, and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of instruction. Incorrect teaching lowers the standard of Truth.
If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force. Man has sought out many inventions, but he has not yet found that knowledge can save him from the dire effects of knowledge. The power of mortal mind over its own body is little understood.
Better the suffering which awakens mortal mind from its dream, than the false pleasures which tend Sin and death. to perpetuate it. Sin alone brings death, for it is the only element of destruction.
“Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” said Jesus. A careful study of this text shows that the word soul meant sense, or corporeal consciousness. The command was a warning to beware, not of Rome, Satan, or God, but of sin. Sickness, sin, and death are not concomitants of Life or Truth. No law supports them. They have no relation to God wherewith to establish their power. Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own Heaven.
Such books as will rule disease out of mortal mind — and so efface the images and thoughts of disease, Good books. instead of impressing them with forcible descriptions and medical details — will help to abate sickness, and ultimately destroy it.
Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post mortem examination, — not from infection, or contact with material virus, but from the fear of Autopsies. the disease, and from the image brought before the mind, — it is a mental state, which is afterward outlined on the body.
The press unwittingly sends forth many a plague among the human family. It does this by giving names New plagues caused by the press. to diseases, and printing long descriptions, which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it. A minutely described disease costs many a man his earthly days of comfort. What a price for human knowledge! But the price does not exceed the original cost. God said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
The less there is said of physical structure and laws, Avoiding errors. and the more there is thought and said about moral and spiritual law, the higher the standard of mortals will be, and the farther they will be removed from imbecility of mind and body.
We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers, in the departments of knowledge now broadcast in the earth, which made them more hardy than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians.
We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate assisted to make them healthy; but that is a Diet and dyspepsia. mistake. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head, and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics. Many effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until individual opinions improve, and mortal belief loses some portion of its error.
The doctor's mind reaches his patient's. He should suppress his fear of disease, or his belief in its reality Harmful physicians. and fatality will harm his patients more than his calomel and morphine, inasmuch as the higher stratum of mortal mind is more potent to injure than its lower substratum, matter. A patient hears the doctor's verdict as a criminal hears his death-sentence. He may seem calm under it, but he is not. His fortitude may sustain him, but his fear has already developed the disease which is gaining the mastery.
The materialistic doctor, though humane, is an artist who outlines his thought relative to disease, and then Disease depicted. fills his delineations with sketches from text-books. It is easy to prevent disease forming in mortal mind, to appear afterwards on the body. The thought of disease is sometimes formed before you see your doctor, and before he undertakes to dispel it by a counter-irritant, — perhaps by a blister, by the application of caustic, by croton oil, or by a surgical operation. Perhaps, giving another direction to faith, he prescribes drugs, until the elasticity of mortal thought haply causes a vigorous reaction upon itself, and thus reproduces a picture of healthful and harmonious formations.
The patient's belief is more or less moulded and formed by his doctor's belief in the case, even though the doctor says nothing to support his theory. His thoughts and his patient's commingle, and the stronger rule the weaker. Hence the importance that doctors be Christian Scientists.
Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has Mind over matter. produced this result, or that a less-used arm must be weak. If matter were the cause of action, and muscles, without the co-operation of mortal mind, could lift the hammer and strike the nail, it might be thought true that hammering would enlarge the muscles. The trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise. Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron? Because mortal mind is not willing that result on the hammer.
Muscles are not self-acting. If mortal mind moves them not, they are motionless. Hence the fact that mortal mind enlarges and strengthens them through its mandate, through its own demand for and supply of power. Not because of muscular exercise, but by reason of the blacksmith's faith in muscle, his arm becomes stronger.
Mortals develop their own bodies, and make them sick or well, accordingly as they move them, through Gymnastics. mind. To know whether this development is produced consciously or unconsciously, is of less importance than a knowledge of the fact. The feats of the gymnast prove that latent mental fears are subdued by him. The devotion of mortal mind to some achievement makes its accomplishment possible. Exceptions only confirm this rule, proving that failure is occasioned by a too feeble sense of power.
Had Blondin believed it impossible to walk a rope over Niagara's abyss of waters, he could never have done it. His belief that he could do it gave his thought-forces, called muscles, their flexibility and power, which the unscientific might attribute to a lubricating oil. His fear must disappear before his power of putting resolve into action could appear.
When Homer sang of the Grecian gods. Olympus was dark; but through his verse the gods became alive in a Homer and Moses. nation's belief. Pagan worship began with muscularity, but the Law of Sinai lifted thought into the song of David. Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Mind instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of Being bestowed by immortal Mind.
Whosoever is incompetent to explain Soul had better not undertake the explanation of body. Life is, was, and ever will be independent of matter; for Life is God, and man is the idea of God, not formed Life and matter. materially, but spiritually, and not subject to decay and dust. The Psalmlst said: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet.” The great truth that man was, is, and ever shall be perfect is incontrovertible, for if man is the image, reflection, of God, he is not inverted.