# Science and Health (1881)/05 Healing the Sick

CHAPTER V.
HEALING THE SICK.
Argue the patient's case silently at first. Afterwards if you can fix Truth stronger in their thoughts, and your patients are prepared for it, explain the metaphysical facts of disease, but array not the mind against its own interests, casting pearls before swine. If the case is that of a young child or an infant, argue it mainly with the parents, silently and audibly on the strictest rules of Christian science. The metaphysician or Christian scientist knows there is no hereditary disease, that matter cannot transmit intelligence, good or evil to man, and mind can produce no pain in matter, and vice versa. Argue there is no disease; it is but the evidence and object of the senses that you have to destroy, not a reality, but a belief that has all the appearance of reality; that the Truth of being is harmony, and discord nothing but a belief; therefore health and harmony are real, sickness and discord unreal; that Life is perpetual, and never changes to death; it is not at the mercy of matter and disease, they cannot destroy it; that sickness, sin, and death are mortal error that Truth destroys; that man is shadow, and God is substance; therefore pain, sickness, and death are not in shadows, nor is the shadow destroyed, because God is its soul and substance that remain. As you argue the case mentally, hold in mind only the ​ perfect model; never think of the disease or of matter as real or tangible. If you make these the reality, as some metaphysical quacks are already teaching, you are forming disease with mind faster than materia medica is making it with matter, and are the most dangerous doctors of this period. Make it the strong point of your argument that God governs man; he is not governed by material law, and is not suffering from its infringements. Say to the patient mentally, You are not sick, and hold your ground with the skill of a lawyer. Argue down the witnesses against your plea, and you will destroy those witnesses, and the disease will disappear. Rely not in the least on the evidences of the senses, but the evidences in metaphysical science of man's harmony and immortality. Here is a phenomenon. We will state it just as we discovered it: if you call not the disease by name, as you argue against it, the body will not respond by recovery more than a person replies whose name is not spoken. This is when you depend upon argument more than the spirit that beareth witness.
Avoid talking disease to the sick; make no unnecessary inquiries relative to their symptoms or supposed diseases; never startle them with a remark discouraging about their recovery; never draw their attention to their symptoms as unfavorable, or give them names for their diseases; never tell them beforehand what you have to contend with in their case, or fix in their thought the expectation that they must be worse before they are better. A cross or complaining nurse should never take charge of the sick. Never conjure up from the dark depths of fear some new discovery, to acquaint your patient with it. Long prayers, in which God is told that ​ the case is hopeless, and asked to take the patient to himself, are the prayers that do not heal the sick. The condition of mind determines the case, and is improved or injured in proportion to the Truth or error that influences its conclusions. The mental conception and development of disease are not known or understood by the patient; but the doctor should be familiar with the action and effects of mind, or he cannot diagnose a case scientifically.
If the case to be treated is a consumption, begin your argument by taking up the leading points that this disease includes, according to belief, showing it is not inherited, that inflammation, tubercles, hemorrhage, and decomposition are but thoughts, beliefs, mental images before mortal minds, not the immortal Mind; hence they are not the Truth of man, and should be treated as error, put out of mind, and then they will disappear from the body. Man is the offspring of Soul and not body, of God and not man; he is spiritual, not material, and God, Spirit, is not in matter giving life and sensation, or producing disease. The Principle of all being is harmonious, never causing discords, such as sin, sickness, or death. Sickness is a belief, and to understand this destroys the belief and breaks the spell of disease. To the metaphysician sickness is a dream, from which the patient needs to be awakened; it should not appear real to him, and when he makes it unreal to his patient he cures him.
The Truth of being destroying error sometimes causes chemicalization, as when opposites meet, and one must destroy the other to form a higher basis. But this fermentation should be as painless to the body as to a fluid, for matter has no sensation, and mortal mind alone feels and ​ sees what it names disease. If an aggravation of symptoms appears, relinquish the arguments pressing so hard upon the destruction of disease, until you abate those symptoms by destroying the belief that chemicalization produces pain; and when you destroy the fear and belief of suffering, there can be no pain, and when the fears are destroyed the inflammation will cease. Calm the fear and confusion of chemicalization, or the alterative effects of truth relative to the disease or error, and explain the symptoms and their cause to the patient. Truth is an alterative to the whole system, and will make it every whit whole. The brain is not diseased, for matter cannot be sick, and Mind is immortal; your mortal body is a mortal belief, and if this so-called mind says I have lost my memory, you must contradict it, for no faculty is lost; your body is spiritual and perfect in every part, harmonious in every action; and let this model appear to your thoughts instead of the sick model. Fear is the foundation of all sickness; some image of disease is frightening you, and your mental state you call a physical state, and what you hold in mortal mind is on the body, because that is the substratum of this misnamed mind, and you mentally see it and feel it. All is mind, there is no matter, and you are only seeing and feeling your belief, whether it be cancer, deformities, consumption, or broken bones. Inflammation is a state of fear that quickens or impedes the action of the blood, just as the body runs or stops before the object of its fear. Inflammation never appears where mortal thought does not reach. That is why opiates relieve it, but they calm the fear by stupefaction, instead of reason and Truth. Matter is never inflamed, and never caused inflammation. Unconscious fear ​ produces it. Note how fear makes the face pallid; it either retards the circulation or quickens it, causing a flushed cheek. Just so it increases or diminishes the secretions, the breathing, the action of the bowels, and the action of the heart. The muscles that move quick or slow, impelled or palsied by fear, represent the action of the entire organs of the human system, the internal viscera, and brains. To remove the fear you must find the image in thought that is producing it. Whatever disease belief says it is, the arguments to destroy it must be addressed to that supposed disease and to what the belief says caused it, extended to its type, and all the symptoms, naming them distinctly as you address them, mentally to unname and destroy them. Remember that metaphysical logic is based upon Truth, a divine Principle, and governed by the simple rules of Mind that governs all things.
The sick know nothing of the mental process by which they are made sick, and next to nothing of the metaphysical method by which they can be healed. The thought latent in the unconscious substratum of mortal mind produces the conscious thought or condition of the body that you call a material condition. Mortal mind is ignorant of itself of the errors it includes, and their effects upon the body.
Commence your treatment always by allaying fear. Argue mentally to the patient, You have no disease, you are not in danger, you have nothing to fear, and are perfectly well; then watch the result of that simple science, and you will find it soothes the symptoms of every disease; and if you never added an argument, but succeeded in destroying his fear without it, you would heal your ​ patient. However simple the process, the science is abstract, and the results sure if the science is understood; and the tree is good that produces good fruit, our Master has told us. The great fact that God governs all and wisely, never punishing for aught but sin, is your basis whence to destroy the human fear of sickness. Blot out of mind the belief and image of disease. If your patient has a belief of taking cold, show him that matter cannot take cold, and then rule out of mind the belief of having taken it. If it is grief that makes him suffer, convince him that sorrow is not the master of joy, and discord more natural or real than harmony. If he is an inebriate, or a slave to tobacco, or the servant of sin, endeavor to meet and destroy those errors with the Truth of being; show him the suffering they bring; convince him there is no pleasure in them; awaken him to a new sense of moral courage and power, and strengthen his ability to master evil and to love good.
If it becomes necessary to startle mortal mind to break its dream of suffering, tell your patient he must awaken, and turn his gaze from the evidence of the senses to the facts of Soul and immortal being. Tell him he suffers only as the insane suffer, from a belief, the only difference being that one believes the brain is diseased, and the other that some other portions of the body are diseased, while both are beliefs and different species of insanity. The entire body is mortal mind, and why a bunion produces not as perceptible insanity as congestion of the brain is because it appears on the lower strata of the body, or that portion that mortal mind calls unconscious and incapable of thought; but reverse this opinion and belief, and it would change the results. If ever ​ it becomes necessary to startle the mind to remove its fears, afterwards make known your motive, showing the patient it was to facilitate his recovery.
Avoid talking of disease, and request nurse, patient, and friends to desist from such conversation. If the sick ask about their diseases, tell them all that is best for them to know, but assure them they think too much and have heard too much already about disease. Turn their thoughts away from their bodies to higher sources, furnishing them with pleasing, good, and true themes, and their bodies will be nourished, and thrive more from Truth than food, and rest in God more than in sleep. By the arguments of the truth of being and your explanations, but especially through the Spirit, or Truth and Love, that governs you, will you heal the sick. You may call the disease by name when you address it mentally, for the purpose of destroying it; but naming it audibly, you are apt to fix it in the mind. When treating it silently in science, you are unclasping its hold and reducing it to nothingness.
Include the moral as well as the physical belief and error in your efforts to destroy them; cast out devils, error; as you heal, “preach the gospel to all nations”; speak truth to all error; remember that man is the image of God, the reflection of spiritual Substance, and God is our only Life and intelligence. When mortal man arrives at Truth, he will learn that tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed or broken bones, etc., are not in shadows, and that man dies not. If from any cause there is a sudden relapse, take up that cause mentally and meet the case courageously, knowing there is no reaction in Truth, and if error reacts it is either ​ from fear or sin. Disease has no intelligence to move itself about, or change from one form into another. Mind produces all action, and if the action proceeds from Truth, immortal Mind, it is harmony; but mortal mind, or error, is a discord of itself, liable to any phase of belief. If a relapse takes place, other minds are affecting your patient's, perhaps, or you may not be bringing out in your life the divine Principle of metaphysics in abiding by its rules. To succeed in healing you must conquer all false beliefs and fears of your own as well as your patient's, and rise daily to higher and holier being.
A moral question may hinder the recovery of the sick; a lurking sin, revenge or malice, perpetuates and creates disease — errors of any kind tend to that. Your only remedy then is to destroy the foe, and leave the field to God, Life, Truth, and Love, remembering all that is harmonious or real is God and His idea.
If the mental malpractioners or mesmerizers are trying to produce a relapse, and becoming dangerous to your patients, remove this obstacle on the same basis of Truth, destroying error, when the reward of their hands shall be given them; “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
Conservatism or dishonesty in the theory or practice of metaphysics, applied to the treatment of disease, would betray a gross ignorance of the whole subject. In science no concessions are made to persons or opinions; we must abide strictly by the rules and Principle of metaphysical science, or we cannot demonstrate it. Disease can neither be treated nor healed metaphysically, if drugs or external applications are employed; and petitioning a ​ personal God to do your work, or enable you to do it, is not metaphysics, wherein Truth works, and you understand the divine Principle of your demonstration. Animal magnetism, clairvoyance, mediumship or mesmerism, are antagonistic to this science, and would prevent the demonstration thereof. Teaching or practising in the name of metaphysics, but contrary to the above rules, is absolute dishonesty, or quackery of a dangerous sort; and quackery of every kind has always imposed upon the people and done more harm than good. Strict adherence to the Principle and rules of metaphysics has constituted the only success of our students, and entitled them to the high standing they hold in the community.
The malpractioners on the list of our students have been expelled from the Christian Scientists' Association, and are about one per cent. Those few having departed morally from the rules and Principle of our system have lost its science, and destroyed their own practice by the committal of crimes and trying to destroy the honest success of others. The method of the malpractioner is mesmerism in ambush, practised with or without manipulation. Unknown to the individuals, they place their minds on them, and through some power, known only to themselves, make them sick, cause them to hate or love as they direct, influence their thoughts, and present motives that govern their actions. Their crimes are most revolting, and although protected at this period from general discovery and just punishment, must ere long be met by divine law, that will overrule the result in the interest of metaphysics, even increasing the demand for this science to afford protection from their secret abuses. Thus God restrains the wrath of man, and it becomes a means of ​ instruction and warning. Evil is the counterfeit of good and seeks its proportions. The infinite Truth of metaphysics has come to this age in the still small voice, the silent utterings of Mind to mind, that accelerate the action and good effects of Christianity. The opposite error appears to the senses at the same time; and because Truth is limitless, the error tries to be as unbounded; and because Truth is mighty to do good, it claims an equal might in error. But Truth is real, and error unreal. Truth is the mighty, and error the powerless, and divine science comes with increasing demands upon the age to prove this. The greatest evil is but the opposite of the highest good, and both have come nearer to the apprehension of the minds of this period. One will remain, and the other will be self-destroyed through suffering. The silent, subtle method of mesmerism at this period, — robbing, killing, stealing, committing adultery, yea, breaking every precept of the decalogue, — must rebound on itself. They have made others suffer in belief, disease and death they have meted out; but their sins have wrought an inevitable result on their own lives too fearful to contemplate; and this awful error, finding no amelioration in ignorance or help from Truth, will “call upon the rocks to fall upon it and hide it from the wrath of the Lamb.” Truth never protects malice from itself, and the same Truth that destroys the error of ignorance increases the sufferings of wilful sin.
A correct thesis of metaphysics, and its adaptation to heal disease, includes vastly more than one sees at first. The books we have read on this subject leave the grand point unconsummated; the mental power they never crown, and carry it against the physical to the extent of science, even the annihilation of the belief of matter, and ​ the fact that matter is nothing beyond a belief; reducing this theory to its scientific statement, and applying the science to healing, and with no other appliance.
We have stated metaphysics, and its application to the treatment of disease, only as we have discovered it, and demonstrated through mind the effects of Truth on the health, longevity, and morals of men. We have found nothing in ancient and modern systems on which to found ours, except the teachings and demonstrations of our great Master and the lives of prophets and apostles. The Bible was our only text-book; we had no other guide in the strait and narrow way of metaphysics. Whoever says there is more than one method of demonstrating this science, a wrong as well as a right way, has uttered a falsehood, ignorantly or intentionally, and taken himself away from the true conception or possible demonstration of metaphysical healing.
Since the issue of this work, we are in receipt of unnumbered letters, “heaps upon heaps,” that are reassuring, heartfelt acknowledgments that the perusal of our book had healed them. All that could be understood of our first and second editions was barely rescued from the abuses of their printers, and, like the homœopathic prescription, a higher attenuation that matter could not destroy.
Mind being the ruling agent and actor, the mortal body is but an effect of mortal mind; hence the importance to understand the leading fear and governing belief of this so-called mind, to remove the cause of the inflammation, as well as the morbid or exciting action, and what are termed organic or functional difficulties. We see on the body the images of mind, even as in optics we ​ see the image painted on the retina that becomes visible to the senses. When a physician names an ailment, describes its symptoms and danger, he has committed an unconscious offence against being, happiness, and health, and will make a sure job for himself, if not a fatal one for his patient.
A lady in the city of Lynn was etherized, and died under its effect, although her physicians insisted it was unsafe to perform the surgical operation without it. After the autopsy, her sister testified that the deceased protested against inhaling the ether, and said it would kill her, but, after that, was compelled by her physicians to take it; her hands were held, and she was forced into submission. The case was brought to trial, the evidence found conclusive, and a verdict returned that her death was occasioned, not by the ether, but her fear of inhaling it. Was it a skilful or a scientific surgical operation, to take no heed of the mental condition? as if the woman was matter without mind, and there was but one to consult, and that one was matter. Had those unscientific surgeons understood metaphysics, they would not have risked her state of mind, and would have allayed her fear, or performed the operation without ether. Such ignorance, yea, cruelty, should arouse thought upon these subjects. Diplomas confer no more rightful claims to kill or torture people than the assassin's steel; and the sequel proved that the lady died from fear, even the action of mortal mind on the body, and not the disease or the operation. Give the sick credit for knowing more than their doctor, sometimes; and always support their trust in the power that mind has to sustain its own body. Never tell them they have more courage than strength, ​ but rather that their strength is in proportion to their courage; and if you make them understand this great truism, there will be no reaction from exertion or animated states. Instruct the sick they are not involuntary victims to disease, that they can resist disease, and ward it off, as directly as a temptation to sin, if only they know how to do it. This fact of metaphysics should be explained to the sick when the mind is in a fit mood to receive it, and will not array itself against it, but become receptive of the new idea. It reassures the depressed mind, and will impart a healthy stimulus to the body, regulating the system, increasing or diminishing the action, as the case may require, far better than an alterative or a tonic in drugs. Mind is the native stimulus of the body; and mortal belief, taken at its best, is not promotive of health and happiness. But surcharge it with the exploding gases of fear and the weakness of defeat, and what can you expect in the case but some sudden detonation, metastasis, or sinking into the belief of death? Tell the sick, if they only knew their mental power over every action and condition of the body, they would meet sickness fearlessly.
“Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him.” Suffer not a belief of sin or sickness to grow upon the thought; dismiss it with the abiding sense of its illegitimate claims, knowing that God is not more the author of sickness than of sin, and both are from the opposite source of Truth, and you have no law of God to support the necessity or truth of either; but you have divine authority for conquering the belief of disease, and if the belief is destroyed, the disease will disappear. Expose the error that would impose penalties ​ for transgressing a supposed law of health, a law without divine authority, and the human sanction is its only power. Instead of a blind or calm submission to the incipient stage or any advanced stage of disease, rise in rebellion against the error of admitting disease as a necessity, and banish all thoughts of entertaining it, permitting not a single fear that you cannot rule out the intruder through Mind, and prevent its development on the body. No law can hinder this result: it is wrong for us to suffer for aught but sin, and God will sustain us in destroying all other sufferings. Justice is the moral signification of law, and injustice should declare the absence of law.
Because the mind is kept constantly active, must it pay the penalty of softened brains? Who can say when mind is overwrought? When we meet our own limits of mental capacity, we conclude we have carried intellectual labor sufficiently far; but when we remember that mind is ever active, and cannot wear out or trespass upon the physical energies unless we say and believe that it does, we are rested in God, Truth, and refreshed by the utterances of immortality, opposed to mortality or the false evidence of a belief. Shall our teachers die early for having performed faithfully their tasks? Shall our printers and authors have the shortest span of existence for occupying the most important posts, and performing the most living functions of society? Shall that man pay the severest penalty who does the most good? If we bear in mind the facts of existence instead of reading disquisitions on disease, the barbarities of being that suppose death comes to us in obedience to God's law, that punishes us for doing good, we shall not suffer from any labor of love ​ but grow stronger for it. A law of mind and not matter must cause whatever results ensue.
When we infringe a supposed law we say there is danger, and this fear causes the danger and decides the physical results. We shall never suffer from a broken law except it be a moral or spiritual demand. The laws of beliefs are destroyed by the understanding that man cannot legislate on times and periods, and types of disease to kill man, and God is not the author of sickness. Therefore let us dismiss sickness as an outlaw, and abide by the rules of perpetual harmony that are God's law. We have a moral right to commute an unjust sentence, for that cannot be passed by divine authority. Every instance of a supposed law of matter or the body governing man is rendered null and void by the law of God; and if you submit to such unjust decrees, it is in ignorance of your God-given rights and through the bias of education, the same as all slavery is enforced. Never suffer the belief that you are sick, or that some disease is developing in the system, to plead in behalf of sickness, and your educated views on those subjects, sooner than you would permit a temptation to sin to urge itself upon your acceptance on the grounds that sin has its necessities.
When the first symptoms of disease appear, dispute the evidences of the senses with the better testimony of divine science and harmonious being; let justice stop the false process of your belief, that you name the law producing sickness, and you will not be cast into prison, fettered and laid away helpless until you pay the last farthing, the last penalty your belief demands.
When the body is supposed to say, I am sick, never join issue or plead guilty, but meet that intimation with a ​ protest.Contradict mentally every supposed complaint from the body, and hold your ground in disputing it until it yields to your side of the question. If sin is not the foundation of your sickness, you will master it by the mental authority you hold over it. But remember sin brings death, and you cannot cure a bodily ailment when a broken moral law has produced it, unless you repent and forsake that sin, and adjust the balance in science. Take antagonistic grounds to all opposed to the health and harmony of mind and body.
When you say “I am sick,” you plead guilty, and thine adversary will deliver thee to the judge, and the judge, which is mind, has already sentenced you. Disease has no intelligence to declare itself something and announce its own name. You sentence yourself, else your doctor, friends, medical books, and mortal mind in general do it. Therefore conclude to make your own terms with sickness, and be just to yourself. Meet every adverse circumstance as its master, and watch mind instead of your body, that nothing unfit to be developed shall come from that universal cause. Think less of what is termed material conditions and more of the spiritual and moral.
Doctors examine the pulse, tongue, lungs, etc., to learn the condition of matter; when the fact remains that all is mind, and this body, misnamed matter, is but the lower substratum of mortal mind, that responds to its higher mandate. Nothing is more disheartening than to conclude there is an opposite power to God, good, that He endows; yet this power is opposed to Him, and to health, harmony, and immortality. Giving all precedence to discord, a large majority of doctors depress the energies of mind, which are the only recuperative powers. ​ To know we can do the good we desire, stimulates the system to act in the direction that mind points out. To admit the belief that a single condition of the body is beyond the control of Mind, disarms the man and empowers matter, thus preventing his helping himself in sickness. The result of this follows as directly to discourage the man who is struggling with adversity, and tell him to submit to every misfortune, and not to overcome difficulties, but let them overcome him; assuring him that all misfortunes and evil are laws of God, against which he should not contend with mind; and unless he can meet them with matter, a drug or a bullet, he has no divine permission to fight, or conquer them.
We should remember that Life is God, and God is omnipotent. Not understanding metaphysical science, the sick have little faith in it until they feel its beneficial effects, showing you their faith is not what heals them. Recollect it is not the body, but mortal mind, that says food is undigested, that the gastric juices, the nervous tissues, and mucous membrane are diseased. The body has not informed you. This mental testimony can only be destroyed by the opposite testimony and its better results. Our speculative theories on health admit that food sustains the life of man, and then discuss the certainty that food can kill a man. This false reasoning Jesus rebuked in those metaphors of the fount and its stream, the tree and its fruit, and a kingdom divided against itself that cannot stand. If God instituted a law of hygiene that food shall support the life of man, He has not annulled that law by another opposite one, that food shall kill man. The materialists contradict their ​ own statements. The belief that pain and pleasure, good and evil, God and devil, fraternize at every point is a hoary mistake, that begins to totter and must fall under the battle-axe of metaphysics.
A case of convulsions produced by indigestion came under our observation; they said she had chronic liver complaint, and was then suffering from obstruction and bilious colic. We cured her in a few minutes. She had said, “I must vomit my food or die,” and immediately afterwards said, “My food is all gone, and I should like something to eat.” Contending persistently against error and disease, you destroy them with Truth; and if mortal mind can remove disease, it proves, on the homœopathic basis, that this mind can produce it. The sick are arguing for instead of against their sufferings, admitting their reality, etc., whereas they should argue against them, and form their plea the opposite of the testimony of the senses and disease, to break it down and give support to the evidence of man's immortality and eternal harmony. For the arguments of metaphysical science to refute the false testimony of material sense is no difficult task, in view of its falsity, and only becomes arduous on account of the tenacity of belief, the force of education, and the overwhelming weight of opinions that the body is matter and suffers, as if matter had sensation. Ignorant of the fact that the mental belief produces the symptoms, the medical doctor establishes the disease in mind and with mind; then addresses himself to destroying it in matter and with matter. That mortal mind embraces the suffering is proven when we remove it by addressing this mind and giving no heed to the body.
The depraved appetites for alcoholic drinks, tobacco, ​ tea, coffee, opium, etc., are destroyed only by the mastery that mind obtains over the body. This normal control is gained through moral strength, the rational understanding. There is no enjoyment in getting drunk or becoming a fool and an object of loathing; but there is a very sharp remembrance of it, a suffering inconceivable to a man's self-respect. Puffing the obnoxious fumes of tobacco, or chewing a leaf native to nothing but a loathsome worm, is brief evidence of insanity, and ought to subject the individual to healthy discipline in some school of reform. Man's debasing enslavement to the most relentless of masters — his own passions, appetites, and malice — is conquered only by a mighty struggle to destroy those poisons of mortal mind, and every hour of delay makes the struggle more hopeless, and if he is not victorious they crush out all happiness, health, and manhood. Here metaphysics is the sovereign panacea that gives to the weakness of mortal mind strength from the immortal and omnipotent Mind, lifting it above itself into purer desires, moral power, and good-will to man.
The homœopathic remedies, without a particle of medicine, are known to relieve the symptoms of disease. But what wrought the cure? It was the belief and faith of mortal mind that changed its own self-inflicted sufferings and produced the effect on its body. Destroy the belief of pleasure in intoxication, and the desire for strong drink is gone; the appetite obtains in mind instead of matter. The pains of sense are less harmful than its pleasures. The belief that matter suffers causes mortal mind to retreat from its substratum, the body, to its higher form, the brain, and thence to divine sources outside of itself. What we term chemicalization, from ​ metaphysical teaching or healing, is when immortal Truth is destroying the belief of mortal error. This action seems to the senses to bring sin and sickness to the surface, like a fermenting fluid, to pass off in aggravation of symptoms and seeming disease latent in mortal mind. Patients unfamiliar with the cause of this stir, and the favorable omen, may grow alarmed. If such is the case, explain to them this action in science. As when an acid and alkali meet and ferment, to bring out a third property, the mental and moral fermentation changes the material base, and gives more spirituality to mortal sense, causing it to lean less on the material evidences of disease or suffering; and thus science, the alchemy of Spirit, God, neutralizes the disease. To know that brains cannot kill a man, or affect the functions of the mind, would prevent their being diseased, except for a moral offence which in itself is the worst belief of disease. The metaphysician should never entertain a doubt of his patient's recovery. Life is the reality to him, and death the unreal; health and harmony are the facts of being, sickness and discord the fables. He should never hold in mind the images of disease, or think of it, only when he is disputing its reality and effacing all its forms and types to himself and his patients. It is mental quackery, to make a reality of disease, and hold it as something seen and felt, and then think to give it the lie. It is no less error for you in belief to see a tumor, a cancer, or decayed lungs, etc., mentally as you argue against their reality, than for your patient to feel them physically in belief. Such practice fastens disease on the patient, and it will appear in some other form more alarming.
Relieve the patient's mind of the depressing thought ​ that he has transgressed a natural law, and must of necessity pay the penalty. Reassure him with the law of love that God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor or deeds of kindness, for exposures to fatigue, cold, heat, contagions, etc. And if he incurs the penalty of law, it is but a law of mortal mind, and not an enactment of wisdom, and he should enter his protest against this supposed law, to help annul it in belief. By this action of mind and its results upon the body, he will prove to himself in small beginnings the grand facts of metaphysics. If you have been exposed to a draft of air in a state of perspiration, and it is followed by chills, dry cough, catarrh, influenza, congestive symptoms of the lungs, or symptoms of inflammatory rheumatism, etc., your remedy is safe and sure in metaphysics. If you are a metaphysician, those bad symptoms will not ensue from the like exposure, but if you believe in a law of matter, and its fatal effects when transgressed, you are not fit to conduct your own case, and should employ a metaphysician to destroy the bad effects of this belief; and when the fear subsides, and the conviction that you may or must be sick on account of some broken law has fled, never rheumatism, consumption, or any other disease will result from that exposure. This is an established fact in science, that all the evidence before the senses can never overrule. Sickness, sin, and death must at length submit to the rights of intelligence, when the power of mind over the entire functions and organs of the human system, will be acknowledged.
It is proverbial that Florence Nightingale, and other philanthropists engaged in humane labors, have endured without sinking fatigues and exposures that people ​ less self-sustained could not have done safely. The cause of this is the support they derive from divine law that rises above the human. The spiritual demand, that walks over the material, affords energy and endurance that surpasses all other aid or support, and prevents the penalty that our beliefs would attach to our best deeds. Let us remember the eternal law of right exempts man from all penalties but those due to wrong, while it cannot annul the law that sin punishes itself.
If there is any mystery in metaphysical healing it is the mystery of godliness to the ungodly, an ignorance of the law of the eternal and unerring Mind. The chemical changes that go on in mortal mind reconstruct the body and promote regeneration. We must have faith, as a grain of mustard, in all the sayings of our Master, even if they are not included in the decalogue and not understood generally by our moral instructors. Jesus said, “He that believeth in me shall never see death”; that statement was not confined alone to a spiritual sense of Life, it included both the spiritual and phenomenal facts. For mortal mind must part with error until it puts off the old man with his deeds, and immortality is brought to light. The body will improve on the self-same Truth that improves the mind. If we are Christians in thought and deed on all moral questions, but mistake the physical facts that Christianity includes, we shall be more liable to sickness than the indifferent sinner, being more alive to the fear of doing wrong. If we are never to overcome death, why does the Scripture say, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”? The entire tenor of the Word shows that, in proportion as we overcome sin, shall we obtain the victory over death. The difficulty lies in our ​ ignorance of what is sin. I account it sin and idolatry to have more faith in drugs, dietetics, air, exercise, bathing, etc., than I have in God, in Truth, and in Love, to keep the body harmonious, and make man undying. The immortal Mind, that governs all that really is, must be acknowledged in this government.
The great fact spiritually must be brought out, namely, that man is immortal. We must begin this work by the more simple demonstrations, and the sooner we begin it the better; but it never can be done until we yield the belief that man dies. When walking, we follow our gaze, we look before we step, and beyond that step, if we are wise; and I find it less wearisome to have the high goal before my thoughts than it is to reckon my bleeding footsteps in reaching it. If the destiny is desirable, it speeds our footsteps and makes us young instead of old, and rested instead of tired thinking of it. If the belief we must die were obliterated, and the understanding that we live on without death were obtained, it would be a tree of life, known by its fruits. We should renew our energies and endeavors, and see the folly of hypocrisy, when we learned the necessity of working out our own salvation. When we learn that sickness cannot kill us, and we are not saved from sin or sickness by death, it will quicken us, master our fears of death, and ultimate in destroying sickness, sin, and death. To relinquish all faith in or fear of death would raise the standard of health and morals far beyond the present period, and enable us to hold the standard that Christianity must hold, and with faith unflinching in Life eternal. Sin brought death, and death will disappear with sin. Man cannot die, and it is sacrilege to believe that he can. The body cannot die, for it has no life ​ of its own. The beliefs of death, sickness, and sin are all that can be destroyed. I have healed hopeless disease and raised the dying to life and health, trusting in God, good, as my only Life. It is a sin to say or believe there is aught that can master God, omnipotent and eternal Life, and this divine life must begin to be brought out here by the understanding there is no death, as well as in sanctification and other graces of the Spirit. Our faith should lengthen its confines and strengthen its basis, resting on Spirit instead of matter. When mortal mind yields its belief in death, it will advance more rapidly towards God, good, Truth, and Love. The belief in sickness and death shuts out Life, God, and heaven from our experiences, as directly as the belief in sin. When will mortals wake to this great fact in metaphysical science? “So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory.” The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law, — the law of mortal belief at war with the immortal facts of Life, — the spiritual law that says to the grave, Where is thy victory? What if the lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than lungs; and the less matter we have the better, and the more immortality we possess. Spirit reconstructs a better body, when it has mastered our fears of matter in the strength of God. Every test of our faith in God makes us stronger, and the more impossible we think the condition of matter that we overcome with Spirit, the stronger is our faith and the purer our love. The apostle says, “There is no fear in Love, perfect Love casteth out fear; he that feareth is not made perfect ​ in Love.” If the lungs are decayed or disappearing, it is but one of the beliefs of mortal mind destroying itself; and mortal man will be less mortal when he learns that lungs never sustained life, and can never destroy it, that God is his Life; and when this is understood, man will be more God-like. No condition of matter can prevent Truth from healing the sick, and destroying error when you have more faith in Truth than you have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in God than in what the doctor and parson think or say. Change your beliefs of matter by your understanding of Life, God, and it will form your lungs anew, and you will never fear them again, but you will fear to offend God by believing that lungs or any other portion of the body can destroy life. The evidences and harmonious phenomena of immortal man will become more apparent as the mortal trusts are giving up and the immortal facts of being are appearing. What we have stated we have proved in our own recovery, and the recovery of many others, upon this metaphysical basis.
For the benefit of our reader, we will quote a sentence from Dr. Benjamin Rush, professor of the practice of medicine in the University at Pennsylvania: —
“It is impossible to calculate the mischief which Hippocrates has done by first marking Nature with his name, and afterward letting her loose upon sick people.”
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, professor in Harvard University says, “I am sick of learned quackery.”
Dr. James Johnson, surgeon-extraordinary to the king, says: —
“I declare my conscientious opinion, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there was not a single ​ physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug, on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality.”
Dr. Mason Good, a learned professor in London, said: —
“The effects of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain, except, indeed, that they have already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine combined.”
We are indebted to the faithful sketches and apt remonstrance of R. R. Noyes, M. D., in his history of medicine, where he says: —
“A drug or substance can never be called a healer of disease; there is no reason, justice, or necessity in the use of drugs in diseases. I believe that this profession, this art, this misnamed knowledge of medicine, is none other than a practice of fundamentally fallacious principles, impotent of good, morally wrong, and bodily hurtful.”
My experience with materia medica has proved it the baseless fabric of a dream, its theory pernicious, and the way out of it the only interesting passage it contains.
We should speak to disease as one having authority over it, having Soul to master the false evidences of the senses, and assert its claims over mortality. The same method that destroys sin is applicable to sickness, for the same invaluable principle cures them both; and when Christianity overcomes materia medica, and supplants faith in drugs with faith in God, sickness will disappear. Again sin will yield to science when, in place of creeds and professions, we learn the divine Principle of being that demands demonstration to prove it and the good it does. Life is the law of Soul, and Soul is never without ​ its body or representative; therefore body can no more die than Soul, and both are immortal. If we believe we die, we must unbelieve it the next moment, until we learn at length there is no death to Truth and no truth to death. If it be a fact that man lives, this truth can never change to its opposite, which must be a lie, and death become the truth. Explain to the sick the power that mind is exercising over their bodies; give them a basis that is understood to battle their fears and to erase the images of disease from their minds. The Scriptures plainly declare the baneful influence of mortal mind on the body. Even our Master felt it, and in certain vicinities did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief in Truth. The contest for the recovery of the sick goes on between minds and not bodies, and the victory will be decided for the doctor only as he subdues the beliefs of disease through whatever method he adopts, whether it be faith in drugs, hygiene, prayer, or the minor methods of treating disease. There are but two modes of practice, and both are carried out through mind; one is quackery and the other science. To heal the sick we must be familiar with the scientific statement of being, namely, there is no Life, substance, or intelligence in matter, all is mind, there is no matter. Mind is immortal; therefore, its embodiment is immortal, and this embodiment is mind, and no more matter in the waking hours than when it acts, walks, sees, feels, hears, enjoys, or suffers in the dream of sleep. Remember there is no mortal mind wherewith to make a mortal body out of the beliefs of death, sickness, and sin. There is but one, the unerring and immortal, and this one contains no mortal views; therefore sin, sickness, and death are ​ unknown in Truth, God, whereas all that is real, good, or eternal, this immortal Mind includes. We have only to turn from the mortal sense of things, the lie of belief, to the Truth of immortal Mind to be made whole. But we cannot believe in the reality of both Truth and error, and succeed with either in science or Christianity. Error is not self-sustaining. Its false supports fail one after another, as in the history of medicine and individual experience, where a drug loses its supposed power and can do no more for the patient, and hygiene loses its efficacy, and all quackery fails to support the credulity of the sick, and they stop recovering. These lessons are useful; they show us we are God-driven, spiritually impelled; they change our basis from sense to Soul, from matter to Spirit, and from error to Truth, naturally and gently.
The Bible contains all our metaphysical recipes for healing, and this is one of them: “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest at any time he deliver thee to the judge and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison; verily I say unto you, thou shalt not come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” As we have said before, sin and sickness are healed on the same Principle, for metaphysics has but one God, one Principle, and this one equal to every necessity and emergency, offering a full salvation from sin, sickness, and death. Apply the aforesaid scriptural rule to healing, and with the approaching symptoms of chronic or acute forms of disease, whether cancer, consumption, or small-pox, agree quickly with thine adversary. Treat the incipient stage of disease with all the power and eloquence that mind would summon in a senate to defeat the passage of an inhuman law. ​ Rise, in the conscious strength of Truth, to master the plea of matter, or mortal mind, pitted against the supremacy of Spirit, to blot out the images of mortal thought, and its beliefs of sickness as well as sin, that when thine adversary, which is the belief in the disease, would deliver thee to the judgment of Truth, it may say to thee, “Well done!” You have fought the good fight on this question. You have said to sickness, Thou art a lie; for any supposed information coming from the body or inert matter, as intelligent, is an illusion of mortal mind, one of its dreams, and it shall take back the lie. Argue silently, There is no such thing as consumption, cancer, or smallpox, for all is mind; and there are no tubercles, pustules, or scirrhus affections in immortal Mind; and there is but one Mind, for God and His ideas are the only realities of being. Realize that the evidences of the senses are not to be accepted in the case of sickness any more than sin. St. John testified in Christian science of but one Mind, and this the author of all that is real, and he destroyed disease with his testimony, instead of building it up, and retained his body from out the boiling oil on this divine basis of being. But the idolators, who believed in more than one Mind, and had “gods many,” thought they could kill the body with matter, independent of what mind said about it, and found their mistake. No person is healed in sin any more than he is saved in sin; he must be better morally as well as physically to be healed. Lust, hatred, and malice make a man incurably sick, where medicine nor mind can help him, except they make him better morally, and so deliver him from his destroyers. Body and mind are one. The heat of hatred, the inflaming brutal propensities, and the indulgence of ​ evil motives and aims will make a man who is above the very lowest types of manhood a hopeless sufferer, and consume the body with its own fires.
“Agree with thine adversary quickly,” master the propensities, hold hatred in abeyance to love, conquer revenge with charity, and deceit and lies with honesty, that is the best policy. Choke these errors in their early stages, if you would not cherish so many conspirators against health, happiness, and success. At length they deliver thee to the judge, the decisions of Truth against error, and the judge will deliver thee to the officer, justice, and it will be executed upon mind and body, for both will be manacled until the uttermost farthing is paid, until you have balanced your account with suffering. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, and the measure he has meted shall be measured to him again, pressed down, full, and running over. This is sin's necessity, to destroy itself, and yield to the government of God, wherein is no knowledge of sin.
Unremitting toil, deprivations, exposures, and every circumstance that is without sin, has its remedy without suffering. Whatever is your duty to do can be done without hurting you. If you sprain the muscles or wound the flesh, and hatred has not caused it, your remedy is at hand; mind decides the question whether or not it shall be discolored, painful, swollen, and inflamed.
Be more fixed in your understanding that mind governs the body, than your foolish fears that matter governs itself, and can ache and swell and be inflamed from a law of its own, when it is self-evident that matter has no pain or inflammation; and your body is as material as the trunk of a tree that you gash, or the electric wire, and ​ would suffer no more from tension or wounds were it not for what mortal mind says. If you believe in inflamed and weak nerves, you are liable to an attack from that source, and will say it is neuralgia, instead of your belief, that occasioned it. If you believe consumption is hereditary in your family, or induced by severe colds, etc., you are liable to the development of that belief, in the form of what is termed pulmonary disease. If you believe a climate or atmosphere is unhealthy for you, it will result thus, and your fears will master you, whatever direction they take. Now reverse the case, and stand porter at the door of your thoughts, admitting only such conclusions as you wish brought out in results on your body, and you can govern it harmoniously. When the circumstance is present that you say, according to hygiene, induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, perform your office as porter, and shut out these unwelcome guests; exercise the mind's authority over the body, and protest against their entering your castle, and you can keep them out; nothing can affect your body to the issues of pain or pleasure, unless the mind says it or fears it, and like a frightened porter forsakes his watch and admits the intruder through fear, concluding he is not strong enough to guard the entrance. But this conclusion is false, for the body is mind, and subject to its control. It seems self-acting matter only because mortal mind is ignorant of itself and its own action and the results upon the body, ignorant that the predisposing, remote, and exciting cause of all disease, bad effects from climate, accidents, etc., is a law of mortal belief, — a law of mortal mind instead of matter; and in proportion as this law is walked over and ​ destroyed in mind will the body be free from its penalties. The only physician I would venture to employ would be a skilful metaphysician or a doctor of physic so advanced that he is disgusted with its “science of guessing,” and self-poised in truth.
When treating the sick, make your mental plea in behalf of the reality of harmony, the nothingness of discord, the fact of health, and the fable of disease, as the Truth of being in contradistinction to the error of life, substance, or intelligence in matter, and plead with an honest conviction of its truth, and a clear perception of its science, and the unchanging, unerring, and certain effects of science. Then, if your morals are half equal to the virtue of your plea, you will heal the sick. Explain to your patient, audibly as he can bear it, the utter control that mind holds over the body; show him how it induces disease by certain thoughts, and how it can remedy it by opposite ones; give him a foundation in the understanding to lean upon, and support him against the baneful effects of his own beliefs; show him that the conquest over sickness as well as sin depends on mind mastering itself and thus destroying the effects of error on the body.
To conclude quickly on the treatment of error, whether it be manifested in forms of sickness, sin, or death, is the first step towards destroying it, and to treat it through mind was the rule our Master practised. He never recommended obedience to laws of nature, if by that is understood laws of matter, or drugging to heal the sick; and if there is a law of Mind applied to healing, that law belongs to God, and should be heeded and practised in the way our Master taught, namely, through mind instead of ​ matter. Disease has no intelligence of its own, and something besides the disease, or what you name that, governs it. You sentence yourself to suffer unwittingly; therefore to know how you do that enables you to commute that sentence and “agree with thine adversary quickly,” to meet every circumstance as its master, and watch your belief instead of your body. Think less of laws material, and you will learn sooner the dominion that God gives man over all things. We must understand our way out of our beliefs and difficulties, or we shall never believe that we are out, and the harmony and immortality of man are never reached without understanding this. Fear and its effects on the body are involuntary. The fear of disease and love of sin are the foundations of man's enslavement to them. Error is a coward before Truth, and death is but another phase of the dream that life is structural, even when we hold forever the consciousness of existence, and have sooner or later the errors of sense to master through science.
Because mortal mind acts unconsciously as well as consciously, the sick say, How can mind have caused the disease that I never thought of, and knew nothing of until it appeared on my body? We have answered this question in our explanation of disease originating in the unconscious mortal mind, or the body that this mind names matter. This mortal blindness and its sharp consequences show our need of metaphysics: we should study mind if we would reach the understanding of Soul and destroy the errors of sense.
To prevent or cure scrofula and what is termed hereditary disease, you must destroy the belief in disease and the fear of its transmission. This task becomes easy ​ as you understand that all disease is a belief and has no character or type, except what mortal mind gives it. Eradicate the image of disease in mind before it has taken tangible shape to be seen on the body. Unconscious mind called matter cannot dictate terms to conscious mind or say, “I am sick.” The belief that the unconscious substratum of mortal mind, termed the body, or matter, suffers and reports disease independent of conscious mind, is the error that prevents mortal mind governing its own body understandingly, and knowing how to do it with better results. Nothing can interfere with the harmony of being or stop the existence of man. He is the same after as before a bone was broken or a head chopped off; for man is perfect and immortal, and the mortal and imperfect, that we call man, is but a poor counterfeit to be laid aside for the pure coin. But this mortal is put away, and the reality of being attained, no faster than we realize that such is not man, and look for a higher model of ourself. Accidents are unknown to God, immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief, and unite with the one Mind to change chance to direction and bring out harmony understood.
The Scriptures tell us that “whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before the Father.” This refers to the Principle of man or Truth of being, showing that a denial, or a just acknowledgment of Truth, and what it has done for us, effectually hinders or helps the results. If pride, superstition, or envy prevents the honest expression or admission of the benefits received, it is a barrier to the recovery of the sick and the success of a student. To cast aside moral honesty for the mistaken policy of dishonesty betrays an ignorance of metaphysics ​ that unfits the student to heal or to teach; and if he babbles our rules like a parrot, he has not understood them, gained nothing of his own, and will not always be able to stand on another's wisdom and experience.
Until the age advancing admits the efficacy and supremacy of Mind, it is better to leave the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to a surgeon, while you are reconstructing mentally and preventing inflammation or protracted confinement. Metaphysical science is the most skilful surgeon, but mental surgery is the highest branch of this science, and will be understood and demonstrated the last.
The time approaches when mortal mind will let go of its personal, structural, and material basis sufficiently for the immortal Mind and its formations to be apprehended, and no material thought will interfere with the spiritual fact that man is idea instead of material substance and all form indestructible and eternal. Then will it be found that mind constructs the body, and with its own materials instead of matter; hence no broken bones or dislocations can occur. We say that accidents, injuries, disease, etc., kill man; but that is not true, for the life of the body is Mind. The body manifests only what mind admits, whether it be a broken bone, disease, or theft.
Fevers are fears of various types. The quickened pulse, coated tongue, febrile heat, dry skin, pain in head and limbs, are the result of mortal mind depicting upon the body the image it holds in unconscious mind, that is frightening conscious thought. This fever-picture has been drawn by millions of mortals, and depicted on the body through the transfer of thoughts from one mortal mind to another, until it rests on some individual mind ​ and becomes a belief of disease, an error that finally destroys itself. Truth is the victor over sickness and sin, that fall by their own weight. Truth is the rock of ages, and “he upon whom this rock shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”
To prevent a fever, or to cure it, you must find the type, get the name, and commence your mental plea against the physical. Argue with the patient, mentally, that he has no fever, and conform the argument to the evidence. If the body is matter it cannot have a fever or suffer, and if it is mind, or governed by mind, it will manifest only what mind says on the subject. Hence, the remedy is to destroy the patient's belief in a fever, by arguing the opposite facts of harmonious being, and portraying man in health instead of sickness, and the impossibility for matter to suffer, to feel pain or heat, to be thirsty or sick. Then say to mortal mind you have no fear of a fever, and need not submit to or feel what you do not desire. You are the master of sense, and can conquer sickness, the same as sin, if only you believe this and will exercise your authority and take possession of your own body, and govern it in what it feels as well as in what it does. Rise in the strength of your God-being to resist all that is unlike Him; for He has made man capable of doing this, and nothing can destroy this ability and power divinely bestowed. If you plead the case in science and for Truth, according to the above, and vary the arguments to meet the peculiar or general symptoms of whatever disease you treat, thoroughly persuaded in your own mind that sickness is a belief and error, and Truth its antidote, and what you utter are the facts of being, you will win the case, and prove yourself an able ​ counsel. It must be clear to you that sickness, not more than sin, can be the truth or reality of man created by God, and there is no other man. This dream of sickness, sin, and death must be broken; and one disease is as readily destroyed through mind as another, when you stop the dream of its being a reality and something to fear. It is easier, and far more congenial, to cure a case of the most malignant disease than a case of sin. We have raised up the dying, because they were willing and glad to be healed, with far less effort, and in comparatively a moment of time, while we were struggling long, and perhaps in vain, to lift a student above a chronic sin.
The sick recover more rapidly under metaphysical treatment than the sinner, and healing is an easier task than teaching, if the latter is performed faithfully and honestly. But healing the sick and reforming the sinner, in science, is one and the same thing; both have the same method, and are inseparable in metaphysics. The sick should never deny their improvement, or impute it to some material cause, when treated metaphysically; for believing matter causation has helped make them sick, and they must turn their attention to the cause in mortal mind, and realize all they can, without a course of instruction, that their beliefs in sickness and material causes, and their fears of both, have induced the condition of which they complain.
The matter-physician, examining bodily symptoms, and doctoring the case according to his diagnosis, and telling the patient he has a fever, could produce that result if it was not already determined. He has “agreed with his adversary quickly,” but upon different terms than the metaphysician, — he has agreed with the disease.
​ Jesus, wiser than his persecutors, said, “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?” He introduced this comparison because the people acknowledged the prophets and the prophets acknowledged him. Again, our Master said, “How can one enter into a strong man's house and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man, and then he will spoil his goods.” In other words, how can I heal the body, without beginning in mind, that controls it? The disease that is destroyed in mind, and the fear of it forever gone, is the only one thoroughly cured. Jesus knew that mortals obtain harmony only as they let go of discord, acknowledge the supremacy of Mind, and lose their beliefs of matter. Mortal beliefs are the “strong man” that must be held in subjection to destroy their effects upon health and morals; and these conquered, we despoil the goods of error.
Deplorable cases of passion mastering man show the necessity of the absolute control the higher faculties exercise over the lower. The animate stratum of mortal mind should govern the inanimate or germinating substratum, and mankind must begin to improve generation. This necessity to uplift the race is father to the fact that mind can do it, and impart purity instead of impurity, beauty rather than deformity, and health instead of sickness, to the body and its formations. A person whom we rescued from the seeming oblivion of Soul in which the senses had engulfed him said to us, “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 have read and the medicines I have taken ​ have only abandoned me to more hopeless suffering and despair. Adherence to hygiene was useless; the mind must be set right. It was not a bodily, but a mental, ailment; and I was cured when I learned my way in metaphysical science.” Metaphysics are accepted at this period by induction. We admit the whole, because a part is proven; and that part illustrates and proves the entire Principle. Metaphysics must be taught, as well as music, and requires a thorough teacher, — one morally and spiritually advanced, for none other can define metaphysics truly, and impart the right power to heal; and the principle of mathematics or metaphysics lies not on the surface of things as seen from the standpoint of the senses. The illumination of spiritual sense and the evidences of divine science furnish the opposite evidence to that before the senses; and they alone give the right perception and understanding of metaphysics. You will find the entire texts of metaphysics in this volume, but their explanation must be brief. We could talk with our reader profitably, and elucidate a single short sentence herein, for an hour or more. Never imagine that you thoroughly understand metaphysical healing at this period from perusing this work, or any other that can be written on the subject. Our personal instructions are what plant you on the spiritual basis of which we treat, lifting you above the old and perishing fossils of the schools, and mentally fitting you to begin this far-off, unattained, and glorious science. We tear down before we build; and this demolishing more than building is the task of teaching metaphysics. We have endeavored to make this work the Esculapius of Mind, giving hope to the sick with its rudimental healing, teaching our reader correctly all that he can learn without our assistance.
​ All science must be thoroughly taught to be understood, and understood to be demonstrated. Charlatanism can never enter the ranks of metaphysics with even as much safety as physics. Admitting the common hypothesis that food is requisite to sustain the life of man, there follows another necessity of admission in the opposite direction; namely, its power to destroy what is termed life through lack or excess, quality or quantity. Such are the ambiguities of all theories regarding health, self-contradicting and self-destroying, — “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 as we learn God, who is our only Life; and because sin and sickness are not qualities of Soul or Life we have hope in immortality. It were foolish to venture beyond our understanding, and stop eating until we gain more goodness in and a clearer comprehension of Life, — God; in which case we shall neither eat to live nor live to eat.
We cannot deny that Life is self-sustained, and should never deny the existence of harmony and its forever in Soul, because there is to the senses seeming discord. It is our ignorance of God, Principle, that discords; the right understanding of Him restores harmony.
A despatch, communicating through mistake the death of a friend, occasions the same grief the reality would have done. You thought your anguish was occasioned by your loss; but another despatch, correcting the mistake, has healed that grief, and you now learn that your suffering was the result of your belief. Thus it is with all sorrow, sickness, and death; you learn at length that there is no cause to grieve if the wisdom of the hour is ​ understood, and no occasion for sickness or sin. A belief and not Truth produces all the sufferings of earth; but if a metaphysician had said to you, when mourning over a belief, “Your grief is without cause,” you would not have accredited it, although it was afterwards proven. So, when your friends depart, and you grieve at their loss, your grief is unnecessary and without cause; and you will know this when you have grown to the understanding of immortality or Life.
We say, “I have burned my finger.” That is a correct statement, for mortal mind and not matter burns the finger. It is sacred history that a high and holy inspiration — certain states of mind — have prevented the fatal results of fire, while another mental state would have induced them. Disease is produced, like other mental conditions, from association with other minds, and in connection with other thoughts. It being a law of mortal mind that certain diseases are contagious, this law obtains through association, calling up the fear that creates in mortal mind the image of the disease and its manifestation on the body. This fact in metaphysics is illustrated by some incident. A gentleman was made to believe he had occupied a bed where a patient died of cholera; and immediately the symptoms appeared, and he also died of cholera, — at least, such was the evidence before the senses; but the fact remains that he neither caught the cholera nor died of it. If her child is exposed to contagions, infections, or any circumstance supposed to contribute to sickness, the mother fears, and says, “My child will be sick”; and the law of mortal mind, but especially her own fear and belief, govern her child more than the child governs herself, and produce the very ​ results she would have prevented. Then she calls it the circumstance or the contagion, instead of mortal mind, that did it. You say or think, because you have partaken of fish or salt food, you must be thirsty, and you accomplish it, while the opposite course would have produced an opposite result. You say you have not slept sufficiently, or have overeaten, etc., and you are a law to yourself for having said it and believed it, and will suffer in proportion to your belief and fear. But your sufferings are not the penalty for having broken a law of matter, for it was none other than a law of mortal mind that you trespassed upon. The remote cause of all disease is a belief in it, — a conviction of its necessity and power, and that mind is helpless to defend the body, and wholly incompetent to control it. The circumstance is powerless of itself, and nothing but the latent belief in and fear of disease associates sickness with the circumstance, and causes them to appear together, even as thoughts by association reproduce poetry or music.
Not perceiving the vital points of metaphysics, and how mortal mind affects the body, acting beneficially or injuriously on health as well as morals and the happiness of mortals, we mistake our methods, and throw the mental weight in the wrong scale, actually injuring those we would bless. Recollect that suffering is not less a mental condition than enjoying; and you cause and increase bodily sufferings by admitting them, and believing they will remain, as directly as you enhance your joys by believing they are real, and will continue. When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, “I am hurt!” and your thought is even more powerful than your words or the accident to make it so. Now reverse the process, ​ and declare you are not hurt, and believe it, — or, better far, understand it, — and you will find the good effects that follow are in exact proportion to your fidelity to metaphysics and disbelief in physics; and this illustrates and demonstrates the facts we claim.
That mother is not a metaphysician, and her affections need better aids to their duration, who says to her child, “You look sick or you look tired; you need rest or you need medicine,” etc., — who goes to her little one, fallen on her nose on the carpet, and, moaning more childishly than her child, says, “Mamma knows you are hurt.” Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are shocking substitutes for the dignity and potency of mind and the divine power to heal. Through the by-ways of physiology and materia medica to lead man into temptation in every direction is pitiful. To victimize the race with prescriptions of liquors for the sick, until mortal mind acquires this educated appetite for strong drinks, and men and women are made loathsome sots, is not only unchristian but heathen.
The physical affirmative to disease should always be met with the mental negative, and whatever the mind desires to produce on the body it should state mentally, and abide by this statement.
If you have sound and capacious lungs, and want them to remain, always have ready the mental protest against the opposite belief of weak lungs, tubercles, or hereditary consumption getting hold of you from any circumstance, and you will find that mind, self-conscious and self-assured of its power, governs the body as directly to results in health as it forbids the muscles to move the hands to steal. Through fear, the body becomes instantly weak or abnormally strong, showing it is mortal mind ​ that produces strength or weakness. A sudden shock from fear or grief has caused instantaneous death. Because fear originates in unconscious mortal mind, it produces disease or death ignorantly and involuntarily. We never knew a patient who did not recover when the fear of the disease was gone. Conscious mind is superior to its substratum, the unconscious body, and the stronger never yields to the weaker except through fear or choice. If mortal mind is its own enemy and works against itself, it can do little in the right direction and accomplishes much in the wrong. Cherishing evil passions and malicious purposes, the mind is not a healer, but an engenderer of disease and death. I would sooner be subject to infection, and every plague on earth, than the culminating effects of guilt. The abiding consciousness of doing wrong will destroy the ability to do right. If sin is not repented of and growing less, it is hastening on the self-destruction of mind and body. The punishments we incur morally, and the ills we fear, are those that conquer us. Disease is a fear expressed, not as much by the lips as the functions of the body. Mitigate the fear, and you relieve the oppressed organ, and inflammation and decomposition abate; destroy the fear, and the organ will resume its healthy functions. Consumption is a mental state of courage under conscious danger that seems anomalous in metaphysics except to the expert. This mental state, being unconscious, is not understood; it is a stage of fear so excessive it amounts to fortitude. The belief of consumption presents an image to mortal thought not exceeded in its fatality, and the patient turns involuntarily from contemplating it; but the fear remains latent and strong in mortal mind, though not acknowledged. Just ​ so it is with the greatest crime: it is the most subtle, and does its work less perceived than others. The most fatal disease is the most hidden, undefined, and insidious belief. Being ignorant of the cause or approach of disease militates not against its mental origin or cause. We confess to ignorance of the future, and incapacity to preserve our own lives, and this belief precipitates results. Such a state of mind induces fear, and is like walking in darkness on the edge of a precipice, with no courage except from forgetfulness of the danger; and whenever reminded of the precipice or we take a casual misstep, the fear is present, and the step less firm because of it. The history of Christianity furnishes sublime proof of the supporting influence and protecting power of the immortal and omnipotent Mind, not only to defend from temptation, but to prevent bodily suffering. Meeting the affirmative to disease with a negative neutralizes the belief and its effects on the body, making discord yield to harmony. A patient thoroughly booked in the jargon of the schools is more difficult to heal through mind than an aboriginal North American Indian who never bowed the knee to Baal.
The Christian martyrs were prophets of metaphysics. Through the uplifting and consecrating power of divine truth they obtained a victory over the senses that metaphysics explains. The opposite extreme of stolidity is a state of mortal mind that suffers less because it knows less of what is termed the material law for suffering.
If mind is the only actor, how does mechanism self-act? When it is understood that all is mind in higher or lower conscious or unconscious strata, it will be seen that mortal mind constructs the mechanism, carries it ​ on, and calls it matter. A mill at work, or the action of a water-wheel, is secondary, an effect; the primary cause is mortal mind. Without mind the body is without action, and that proves and defines the actor. Mortal mind sends its despatches to the body, it is both the telegraph office and the wires. Nerves are unable to report; matter can return no answer to mind. When blood rushes through the veins, or languidly creeps along those frozen channels, we call it disease; but this is a misconception, — fear is producing it; and we prove that, for when the fear is destroyed the standard circulation that mind has settled on for health will return. Anodynes, counter-irritants, or depletion, never reduced inflammation like the truth of being whispered into the ear of thought. But metaphysics can be abused; a mere smattering of its science becomes a shocking bore, a petty cross-fire on every poor cripple and invalid, sending into him the cold bullet, “Nothing ails you.” The question is, Which is first, mind or pain? You say a boil is inflamed and painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your belief of pain, inflammation, and swelling, and you call this belief a boil. Heat or cold is a product of fear; the body, bereft of mortal mind, is first cold and afterwards nothing. Fear produces animal heat and expels it through other beliefs, as sweats, humors, etc., that abandon fear or else increase it to self-destruction. Sin is fear, and must produce inflammation and death in belief.
Heat would pass off from the body as painless as gas evaporates, but for the belief that inflammation attends it, and that pain accompanies inflammation. Chills are ​ often the form that fear manifests. Change the mental state, and the chills disappear. A mesmerist even proves this, but a metaphysician can never prove it as he does. The mesmerist scares the individual into quaking, not knowing what is frightening him. The metaphysician removes that scare and stops the shaking, but could not produce the fear. Truth punishes sin, but cannot produce either sin or sickness. The patient may tell you he has a humor in the blood, or scrofulous diathesis. But his parents must have believed that before him, or some of his progenitors must have transmitted that thought, for mind, not matter, formed that conclusion and its results. You will have humors just as long as you believe them safety-valves, or something inherited or superinduced by matter instead of mind. A corrupt mind is made manifest by a corrupt body. Lust, malice, and evil of all sorts are diseases, beliefs, and you can only destroy them by destroying the wicked motives producing them. If the evil has fled from animate mind, and the effects of its devastating fires remain on the inanimate body, you can remove the disease only as God's law is fulfilled, and punishment cancels the crime. Fear, and the results of ignorance or of malice, are the whole of disease. You can destroy the fear and results of ignorance with metaphysics, but you cannot destroy the fear and its effects, that sin produces, so long as the sin remains in motive or desire.
A mental state of self-condemnation or guilt, or a faltering or doubting trust in Truth, is an unsuitable state with which to heal the sick. Such a mental state is weakness instead of strength; hence the importance of understanding the necessity of being right yourself to teach ​ this science or to heal with it. The might of Mind and its moral power to walk over the waves of error you must exercise, and support those claims in demonstration. In the belief and fear of disease yourself, and ignorant of your mental remedy, you fail to use the latent energies of mind in your own behalf, and exercise no power in that direction to help another. You must first cast the beam out of thine own eye before thou canst see clearly to cast the mote out thy brother's eye.
Men of business have said metaphysical science is important from a secular point of view; that it enhances their physical and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them aptness, comprehensiveness, and ability to act beyond their ordinary capacity in business. The mind imbued with the science of Life is more elastic, capable of more endurance, and its body requires less repose. The science of being develops the latent capacities and possibilities of man, extends the atmosphere or aroma of mind, giving mortals vent in broader and higher channels. An odor confined by a stopper is not as benevolent as the escaped fragrance. Yield the belief that mind is located beneath a skull-bone, and matter is the limit of man, and there quickly follows more of the man and woman, and they understand themselves and others better.
Man is not sick; for mind is not sick and matter cannot be. A belief is all that mortals or mortality include. A belief is the tempter and tried, the sin and sinner, the disease and its cause, death and the dying. Thinking of sin and death is not the method of destroying them. It is well to be cheerful in sickness; to be hopeful is better: but to understand there is no sickness except to belief is the ​ universal and entire remedy. We admit that one mortal mind can influence another, and thereby affect the body, but never calculate we are governing our own body with mind. The mesmerizer produces pain by making his subject believe he feels that pain. Here pain is proven a belief without any physical cause. To this belief of pain let that social curse, a mesmerizer, add a belief of disease, and keep up this state of belief sufficiently long, and if the subject of this abuse is ignorant of the cause, and not a metaphysician able to defend himself, the mesmerizer will accomplish his purpose. The mesmerist, by making his subject believe he cannot move a limb, renders it impossible to mortal mind until this belief is removed. Thus the sick mesmerize their bodies, through belief, to conditions of stiffened joints, contracted muscles, etc.; and the only difference between the voluntary and involuntary mesmerism is, that one is done consciously and the other unconsciously. One case of deformity or disease is understood a belief, and the other is believed an effect of matter. Mind is employed to remove one case of disease and matter the other; whereas both had their origin in mind, were produced by it, and should be healed by it.
Faith in medicine and the lapse of time are affecting our fears and changing our beliefs, even removing bodily ailments for the time, and changing them into new and more difficult forms, until at length the science of Mind comes to the rescue and we comprehend the mystery of being. Mesmerism can stiffen a joint and make the muscles rigid through a belief; hence the error of mesmerism and its ability to do evil, and the power of Truth to disarm it. “But,” says one, “no man can mesmerize me.” ​ That is a mistake, if he is a mortal man, for he is producing that result on himself; and because his belief is more positive, and his power beyond others, he does it and will do it, until this belief is deprived of its imaginary powers by Truth, and the might of Soul sweeps away the whole gossamer web of mortal beliefs. The most self-reliant state of mind is rectitude and understanding, and the one best adapted to healing the sick.
Expose the material body to certain temperatures, wet, etc., and belief says it takes cold and has catarrhs. But no such result can occur without mind to say it and produce it. The corpse deserted by thought is cold and disappears, but never suffers. Mind has its body with it always, and subject to what mind says of it. Mortal mind sometimes says to the body, “You are dying — disappearing to me; but to others you will remain, and they will bury their belief of me, and say my body will decompose into dust; but I shall retain and form a body according to my belief; yet I and my body will not be seen by those who think they bury me, for body and mind are one.” While the belief says that certain states of the atmosphere produce catarrhs, fevers, rheumatism, or consumption, those effects will follow, not because of the climate, but the belief. We have healed those diseases through the action of Truth on the mind, and its corresponding effects on the body, in too many instances not to know that fact. Invalids flee to tropical climates to save their lives, but come back no better; and then is the time to cure them with metaphysics, and prove to them they can be healthy in all climates when their fear of climate is gone. The body that we call me being mortal and material, this me is a mortal and very material mind, and quite ​ as material in its beliefs as the body that it originated through material sense, and develops according to it. This materialism of parent and child is mortal mind and not matter, as the dead body proves that is no longer thy parent when the law of mortal mind has doomed that body to death and decay.
The science of being unveils the errors of sense. The more spiritual perceptions, aided by science, will sometime reach the standard of Truth; and then error will disappear; sin, sickness, and death will seem less real as we approach that period, and consequently they will become so; and we shall no more fear falling into sickness than sin. The moralist has no fear of committing a murder. Being the master of such a temptation, it never presents itself. The Christian scientist has conquered sin to the extent of becoming a sound moralist, or he never was a scientist. Then he has conquered sickness in the same proportion, and with that same mental power recognized and exercised over the body. Sickness to him is no less a temptation than sin, and he meets it, understanding his moral power to destroy it, knowing it is an error of belief that Truth can and will destroy. Resist the devil, error, of whatever sort or claims, and it will flee from you; error is opposed to Life, its harmony and continuance. We can and shall ultimately rise to the available supremacy of Truth over error, Life over death, and good over evil in every direction, until we no more fear we shall be sick or die than that we shall steal, murder, or commit suicide. Sickness, as well as sin, is a moral weakness, temptation, and fall, — a loss of that control over the body that the apostle said to exercise “is our only reasonable service.” Let ​ the slave to a wrong desire learn the science of being, and he becomes the master of that desire, and ascends somewhat higher continually the scale of health, happiness, and Life.
If mankind would study the science of mind with half the avidity they pursue these phantoms of belief, sin, sickness, and death, the so-called pleasures and pains of material sense, they would advance, not from one disease to another and to decrepitude and death, or from one immorality to another, until man reaches a convict's cell or a scaffold, but the whole human family would finally be redeemed by the merits of Christ, the glorious Truth that destroys all error; for Truth is our Life. In it we live, move, and have being; out of it all is imaginary and unreal, even this error of mortal existence.
The pallid invalid that you say is wasting away from consumption of the blood should be told that blood never gave life and can never take it away; that there is more life, immortality, in one good motive and act than in all the blood that ever flowed through mortal belief to stimulate a personal sense of life in matter. Let the despairing invalid, examining the hue of her blood on a cambric handkerchief, read the experiment of the Oxford students, who took what we term the life of a felon through the belief that he was bled to death, when he had not been bled and not a drop of blood was lost. Then let her apply the opposite principle of Life, as in metaphysics, to her own case, and she will learn that she is not dying from any state of the blood, but suffering from her fear of blood destroying life, when the fact remains that this so-called vital current is not affecting her health, but her fear is, and producing the results she fears. The belief ​ that Life is contingent on matter must be met and mastered with science before Life is understood and its harmony obtained. Metaphysical healing has this advantage over other methods: it is Truth controlling error, by which man goes up higher; other methods are error opposing error, thus increasing the final conflict when the stronger error is to be overcome.
Disquisitions on disease in public or private have the same effect as telling ghost stories in the dark. Little is known or understood of our present existence except that we are here without our consent, to be removed as involuntarily, not knowing why or when. This is darkness, and we are children listening to ghost stories, formulas of beliefs pointing in every direction but the right and the way out of difficulties. In darkness we are in fear. The adult not more comprehends his own being than the child, and must be taken out of his darkness to get rid of the sufferings it occasions. That Life is not contingent on bodily conditions is proven, when Life and its phenomenon, called man, goes on after this body is destroyed. We cannot discern spiritually either sin, sickness, or death; hence they disappear in proportion to our spiritual growth. Recollect that sickness is not imaginary; it is more than a fancy, — it is a solid conviction and belief. One animal looking another in the eye infuriates him, and both fight for nothing; but man's gaze, fastened fearlessly on the beast, tends to turn him away in terror. This illustrates the power of Truth over error, the might of intelligence exercised over mortal fears, compared with the physiological drills and drugs to cure disease, which is error meeting error, — yea, the quarrel between beasts.
​ The sick deserve our sympathy and should claim our efforts more even than the sinner, if we can rely on God to help one and not the other. The movement cure, pinching or pounding the poor body to make it sensibly well when it ought to be insensibly so, is another medical paraphrase on progress, which if not diplomaed is in accordance with the general jargon that bases all action on inert matter, instead of mind. Can matter, or what is termed that, resuscitate without mind? We say that certain combinations of gases, secretions, acute or morbid, material causes, produce disease; but if the body causes disease and the body is matter, can matter cure what it causes? Remember mortal mind prescribes the drug and administers it; plans the hygiene and puts the body in motion under it. Not a gas accumulates a secretion or combination occurs unless mind does it.
Anatomy describes muscular action as produced by mind in one instance and not another. This fallacious argument besets every material theorem, one statement contradicting another, yea, “a kingdom divided against itself that is brought to desolation.” The action or movement of the arm is not more dependent on the direction of mind than the action or secretions of the liver, for when mind quits the body both actions cease, and one not more than the other. Anatomy admits the necessity of mind conveying its mandate to the muscles and limbs in order to move them; but what does it say when those muscles contract and are immovable? Has mind ceased speaking to them in that case, or can muscles, bones, blood, nerves, etc., rebel against mind in one instance and not another, and become immovable despite the mind's protest or command to move? A new ​ power called disease, having disputed the empire with mind, dethrones it and takes the government into its own hands. But is this aggressive, self-constituted power-intelligent, or how can it act and cope skilfully with mind until it conquers it? Has God endowed sickness to disable mind and close upon harmony with the long, cold night of discord? Such a division of power without direction is inconceivable, and if directed it manifests less wisdom than human forms of government. Unless the muscles are at all times self-acting, they are at no time capable of acting contrary to the direction of mind. If they can stop acting and become rigid of themselves, be deformed or symmetrical as they please, or as disease directs, wherefore consult anatomy to learn how mind governs muscles, only to learn at last that it does not govern them? Is man a fungus of matter, without mind to help himself, wherein a stiff joint or contracted muscle is as normal and imminent a result of law as the opposite supple and elastic movements of the human system? If what is termed disease can attack and control the body without the consent of mind, sin can do the same, for both are error, and were announced from the beginning in partnership. The metaphysical doctor finds only effects where the physical doctor looks for causes; hence the more ample sway and jurisdiction of metaphysics, wherein mind controls effects and recognizes all causation in itself.
The prophylactic and therapeutic arts belong emphatically to metaphysics, and this would be readily seen if psychology, or the science of Soul, was understood. The failing method of materia medica is finding its proper level; limited by its own law to matter, it has none of the advantages of mind.
​ Ontology is that portion of our metaphysical system which first engaged our attention, wherein we found the nature and essence of all being, its essential qualities and attributes. The pharmacy of metaphysics is the moral, intellectual, and spiritual preparation of mind to medicine and heal the body; and this very important branch is the one most abused and least demonstrated by metaphysical quacks of all its departments of education or practice.
The anatomy of metaphysics is first self-knowledge, then the art of dissecting thoughts in others to discover their quality, quantity, and economy. This branch of metaphysics is indispensable to the surgery of error; it teaches when and how to probe the self-inflicted wounds of malice, envy, and hate, to bid mad ambition be still, and give to the hallowed influences of unselfishness, philanthropy, and love the government of the body, both in health and sickness.
The obstetrics of metaphysics is its highest branch and one with which teacher and student should be familiar. To attend properly upon the birth of the new idea you must so detach thought from its material basis that the birth be normal and safe to the laboring thought, that, gathering new energies, injures none of its useful surroundings in the travail of spiritual birth, and takes not with it a single element of error, but discharges properly the offal of matter. Then shall the new idea, conceived and born of Truth and Love, be clad in white garments, — its beginning meek, its growth mighty, and its maturity without an element of decay.
The treatment of insanity is especially interesting in metaphysics; however obstinate the case, it yields more naturally to the salutary action of Truth, and its ​ counteraction of error, than most diseases. The leading arguments are the same in this as all cases of disease, namely, the impossibility for matter to suffer or to control mind, and the possibility and certainty that mind, properly endowed, morally and spiritually qualified by Truth, can bring out healthy brains and destroy all error, whether it be named physical or mental. There are many species of insanity. Sin is a high degree of insanity; and only that its method of madness is more in consonance with the mortal belief in general, is it spared the classification of insanity. Every sort of sickness is but a lesser degree of insanity, it is hallucination; and because this is not acknowledged or discovered by all, it changes not the fact. The universal insanity that mistakes the fable for the fact throughout the entire evidences before the material senses, covers the individual case, and spares it the name of insanity. Those unfortunate individuals committed to asylums are but the well-defined instances that afford clearer proofs of the baneful effects of our beliefs on mind and body. We cannot doctor both mind and matter in any case, for there is but one, and that is mind. To conclude that we can correct mind with material purgatives and narcotics is a mild species of insanity. Does the medicine go of its own direction to the brains, and destroy inflammation or disordered functions, and reach mind through matter; or is it distributed first through the blood and thence to intellect and sentiment? Take the medicine you prescribe, and lay it with your hands on the brains, and let mind be parted forever from that body, and would it restore mind? The only effect produced by medicine is what the mind says that medicine can do, and then does ​ it through faith in its own media. You would object, in materia medica, to one doctor administering a remedy, and another giving what counteracts its effect. It is not less important in metaphysical practice that the minds surrounding your patient are not acting against your direction of mind, by continually pronouncing on the case, and alarming or discouraging or advising in any way your patient. You can gently request the friends of the sick to leave your patient out of their thoughts as much as practicable. Tell them you have as much better prospect of being heard mentally when addressing your patients without other minds dwelling upon them as when you speak audibly and others are not talking. You want the ear of your auditor, and because it is more difficult to be heard mentally when others are thinking of your patients or conversing with them, you seek to be alone when treating them.
A scientific metaphysician never converses on other subjects while treating the sick. The metaphysical scientist discerns more clearly the mental cause of disease than the anatomist does the physical, and goes to work more understandingly and self-assured. The greatest hinderance to the prosperity of metaphysical healing has been the envy of malpractitioners, seeking to stop the better success of the honest practitioner through a counter-current of mind designed to affect the sick like opposite medicines, producing irritation and death. Our Master read the thoughts of mankind, and this spiritual discernment better enabled him to direct them aright; but what would be thought at this period of the infidel blasphemer who should hint that Jesus used his divine power injuriously? The higher your attainment in ​ metaphysical healing and teaching the more impossible it becomes for you to influence minds adverse to their interests. Jesus could injure no one by his reading mind: the effect of his mind on all was to heal and save. Sin suffers from itself, not from truth. His holy motives and aims were traduced by the sinners of that period, and would be to-day by those of this if he was personally present, practising Christian healing. No one discerning the divine method and power of Truth to heal the sick, and taught this of God, not man, can misuse his mental power to heal. This strong point in metaphysical science is not to be overlooked, — the same fountain cannot send forth sweet and bitter waters. The student can mistake in judgment and demonstration who receives his knowledge of metaphysics, or Christian healing, from a human teacher; but God cannot mistake in selecting that one for His service who must have grown to a fitness that renders it impossible to abuse this mission.
The All-wise never bestows trusts to the untrustworthy when He commissions them to speak to the age something new and nearer Himself.
Since the divine light of Christian healing first dawned on our thought through the higher understanding of right and God, we have been a law to ourself never to use the newly discovered and awakened powers of mind in any direction that we would fear to declare openly. It was years after we were personally attacked by the mental malpractice before we defended ourself or taught our students self-defence. Until this attack was aimed at our life, we never resisted, or even investigated this subject thoroughly, and so discovered the full purpose and extent of a mental malpractice. But when we ​ gave our attention to it, and found how to save the scattering ranks of our Christian students, that had already been mown down like grass, we resolved in the strength of God to save them and others from the hands of these murderers, and to find His sure defence the ever-present help. Since God has shown us our way in Christian healing, our mind often heals involuntarily. The malpractitioners know this, and many a time have asked us about their patients to direct our thoughts to them, knowing the benefit therefrom. They know as well as we it is morally impossible for science to produce sickness, but science makes sin punish itself. They should have feared for their own lives in their attempts to kill us. God is supreme, and the penalties of their sins they cannot escape.
Turning the attention of the sick to us for the benefit they may receive from us is another milder species of malpractice, that is not safe; for if we feel their sufferings, not knowing the individual, we shall defend ourself, and the result is dangerous to the intruder.
We have never employed our method of metaphysics or any occult method to injure an individual on the earth. Until the Judases multiplied that betray Truth for thirty pieces, it never presented itself to us that the truth of God could be made to appear a lie, as the Scriptures prophesy. Because the good we are striving to do through Truth, and the crimes that some recreant students are secretly committing through malpractice, are both undiscoverable in their origin, they have always claimed for themselves what we did, and we seldom have even denied that claim; but now that they are trying to lay on our shoulders the evil they are doing, we shall expose them. ​ Their first robbery was a less injustice than their last, since all is hidden in the silence of mind.
All who have any correct knowledge of metaphysics know that with our understanding of it we cannot be mesmerists. The malpractitioners know this better than all others, but are the soonest to deny it. Had they abided by our teachings, they could never have traduced our system by a malpractice, and so exchanged metaphysics for mesmerism. For the last ten years we have had no rest, and with unremitting toil have not had sufficient time to do the good we desired, much less to be busy in wrong-doing. The entire object of our labors since we entered this field has been to relieve and to prevent suffering, never to produce it; and learning to do one, we unlearn the other. This is a self-evident proposition in metaphysics. But since our discovery of their crimes, and their methods of committing them, we can defend ourself, and shall do all in our power to aid others to understand self-defence. Those students, charging their crimes upon others, defrauding the people, and living on our toils, are those whom we have helped gratuitously, more than any others. We are informed that a student of metaphysics is taking written copies of our printed works, and selling them as his own in the United States and in Europe. Mr. Edward J. Arens studied metaphysics with our husband, Dr. Asa G. Eddy, in 1878. His classmates were Drs. S. G. Todd, of Newburyport, and C. E. Choate, of Boston, Mass.
We have sometimes wondered if the disciples of our Master, or the primitive healers, had such a ripe experience with the alternatives of sin as open on this hour, — if they had to meet these hidden arrows of the wicked, that the ​ Christian healer now has to meet, and be able to say, “All these things cannot move me.”
Our Master read mind from a scientific basis, even the omnipresence of Mind. To discern the thoughts, after his example, as the outflowing of spiritual growth, a union with the one Mind, and its infinite capacities, belongs to the science of metaphysics. Paul said, “To be spiritually minded is Life.” We approach God, Life, in the ratio of our fidelity to Truth, and are able to discern the thoughts of the sick, that we may heal them and the sinner, that cannot hide himself from the eye of Wisdom. Whoever reaches this point cannot harm, and must bless, others by this capacity. The greater or less ability of Christian scientists to discern thought depends on their faithfulness. This mind-reading is not clairvoyance, and is not only important to our success in healing, but characterizes it.
The physical effects on the senses explain the bad results of fear on the body. Gazing long and helplessly on a lion crouched to spring on you, would you not suffer and feel weak after it? But you should know the body is not affected by that fear more hopelessly than by the images of disease before the mind. Unless both those objects of fear are removed from observation and contemplation, the senses will at length be paralyzed by them into a belief of death. Nothing but the power of Truth, even metaphysics thoroughly understood, could prevent a fatal result from either of these causes if they continued, and prove man's dominion over the beasts of the field, the fear of disease, etc. Without fear there can be no inflammatory or morbid action and no death. By looking a tiger fearlessly in the eye, Sir Charles Napier sent him cowering back into the jungle.
​ Sir Humphrey Davy cured a case of paralysis by simply introducing a thermometer into the mouth to ascertain the temperature of the body, and the patient supposing that was the method by which he would be healed. If half the care bestowed on hygiene were given to the study of metaphysics and the moral elevation of thought, it would usher in the millennium.
Bathing and brushing to correct the secretions, or remove unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle, receive a useful rebuke from Christian healing, that makes not clean the outside of the platter, and a hint from the Irish emigrant, whose filth has not affected his health because of the correspondence of mind and body. To the mind equally gross, dirt gives less uneasiness. It is the native element of this so-called mind, therefore its surroundings show it but do not chafe it. The impurity or uncleanliness that affects not the health of the gross could not be borne with impunity by the refined. We need a clean body and a clean mind, and the body rendered pure by mind not matter. One says, “I take good care of my body.” No doubt he attends it with as much care as the grooming of his horse; and possibly an animal sense of scrubbing, for cleansing, has more meaning to him than the pure and exalting government of mind over the body. The scientist takes best care of his body who leaves it most out of his thoughts, and, according to St. Paul, “willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”
John Quincy Adams was an instance of health and physiology, but there are few others. The tobacconist, eating or smoking poison for half a century, tells you it preserves his health; but does this make it so, or prove ​ that the use of tobacco is a healthy habit, and he was better for using it? Such instances prove only the power of belief and its effects on the body, fastening our conclusions that, “as man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The man of avoirdupois objects to our small estimate of the table; the sinner sees the demands from God must be met; the diminutive intellect is alarmed at our exclusive appeals to mind, and the licentious are discouraged with their prospects for soul: so when all are bidden to the feast of metaphysics, one has a farm, another merchandise, and therefore they cannot come. But Truth compels us all at length to exchange the so-called pleasures of sense for the joys of Soul, step by step, and in ways we least expect. Contending for the inharmonious evidence of the senses, we literally contend against the control of mind over the body, and its power to produce the result we desire. This false method is like the defendant arguing in behalf of the plaintiff, and in favor of a law that he knows will sentence him.
We would not, because we believe we could not, transform the infant at once into a man, or keep the suckling a life-long babe. We ask no impossible thing when we urge the claims of metaphysics; and because metaphysics is in advance of the age, we should not say, the fact is that our life depends on matter now, but will not after we die. We cannot spend our days here in ignorance of the science of life, and then find death a reward for that ignorance or sloth, making us harmonious and immortal because we have been unfaithful. Giving no heed to the Life that is spiritual and eternal here, we are not ready for it hereafter.
The Scriptures declare that “man liveth not by bread ​ alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” showing clearly that Truth is the life of man; whereas the age objects to making this practical. If we believe that food disturbs the harmonious functions of mind and body, either the food or the belief must be dispensed with. Which shall it be? If the belief be not destroyed, it may say you are dying from eating, and again, you are dying from not eating. So, you perceive, the penalty is attached to the belief. The less we know or think about hygiene, the less we suffer. It is understood that the heathen nations are more exempt from contagion than Christian nations. Our missionaries introduce measles, small-pox, etc., to the heathen; but do they show them, either by precept or example, the power of God, Truth, to prevent and destroy disease? But the poor heathen, ignorant of what is termed hygienic laws, is healthier than the devotee to his supposed laws. What then shall we think of “a law more honored in the breach than the observance”? The watchword of perfect freedom from the bondage of sickness and sin has little inspiration to nerve our endeavors; and this is owing to the fatal belief that error is as real as Truth, and evil an equal power, if not superior, to good, and discord as normal as harmony.
If man existed not forever, and before what is termed material organization, he does not exist after his body is disintegrated. If we live after the belief of death, and are immortal, we lived before what is termed birth: for life has no beginning or ending; if it had one, it must have the other. Do you believe this? No! Do you understand it? No! And this is the only reason you doubt it, and why the metaphysician is nearer the ​ kingdom of heaven than you. We weep because others weep, and yawn because they yawn, and have small-pox because they have it; but mind, not matter, contains the infection. When mental contagion is understood, we shall be more careful of our company, and avoid the loquacious advocate of disease as we would the advocate of crime. Sympathy or society should never subject us to the listening or to the advocacy of error.
Palsy is a belief that attacks mortal mind, and this mind paralyzes the body through fear, and holds certain portions of it immovable according to this belief. Destroy the fear and belief of palsy, require mind to make those parts act, show it that none of its power is gone, but is supreme over the body, and you will cure the palsy.
Ossification, or any abnormal condition of the bones, is the action of mortal mind as directly as insanity. Bones have no more substance than thoughts, and are only what they are named by and appear to mortal mind. They consist alone of this mind; they are the so-called substances of belief, formed first by the parent's mind. By self-division they become another form of individualized thought, and another so-called mind that takes possession of itself. What we call matter was primitively error in solution, unformed beliefs, likened to chaos and old night. Its derivative states are the conceptions of this so-called mind, the varied forms of belief, one of which is that mind forms itself into blood, flesh, bones, etc. The science of being, wherein all is mind, would still be apparent but for this last belief that Mind can result in matter, or enter its own forms of thought and bind itself with its own beliefs, and call those manacles of mind matter. Let us suppose two parallel cases of bone-disease, ​ both produced similarly and attended with the same symptoms, while a surgeon is employed in one case and a metaphysician or Christian scientist in the other. The surgeon, believing that a substance that is matter forms its own conditions and renders them fatal at certain points, must entertain fears and doubts as to the termination of the case: holding not the reins of government in his own hands, believing that something stronger than mind, called disease and matter, are governing the case, his practice is but a side issue. This mental state invites defeat; and this knowledge that he has a master, and may not be able to meet the case, combined with his fears, are communicated to his patient, whether verbally or otherwise, and they disarm his resistance to an unfavorable termination. Remember the unexpressed fear oftentimes reaches the sensitive patient with stronger emphasis than when expressed. Being forewarned, he is forearmed to contend against his fears. The metaphysical scientist, understanding that all is mind, commences with causation; that which forms the body according to its belief, and makes the belief right, gets the image of cicatrization, abnormal growths, dislocation, curvatures, etc., expelled from the thought, and sets the belief to building more symmetrically; or, better still, with the truth of being destroys the error or belief in matter to such an extent, the phenomenon of Truth instead of error, harmony instead of discord, suppleness instead of stiffness and deformity, appears at once. The matter-physician has contended with matter as both his foe and his remedy in determining the case, and been weakened or strengthened according to its evidences. The metaphysician has made immortal Mind his basis of operation irrespective of ​ matter, and regarding the Truth and harmony of being as superior to its error and discord, has rendered himself strong instead of weak to cope with the case, and correspondingly strengthened his patient with the stimuli of courage and conscious power; therefore both now are at work in the economy of being, and according to the law of Mind that must ultimately assert its supremacy to promote the recovery of the patient. And which is most likely to reign when mind governs in both cases? and which has the advantage, Truth or error, to govern the result through mind and bring out harmony?
Called to the bed of death, what remedy have we in matter when all its remedies have failed? Mind must be our only resort at last, and should not be deemed the least of all power, as we shall learn from this startled moment. To break the dream of death, thought must waken from its slumber of belief and catch this trumpet-tone of Truth. There is no death, all is mind, there is no matter, — “he is not dead but sleepeth.” Life will seem real and death unreal, proportionately as we take not matter into consideration; but regarding the case materially, or despairing in the least because of the evidence before the senses, we shall not demonstrate the facts of Soul, and dissolve the dark vision of sense with forms of harmony and immortality. Our privilege at this supreme moment is to prove the words of our Master, “He that believeth in me shall never see death.” But, alas! who is sufficient for these things? To so divest our beliefs of their false trusts and so-called material evidences that mind sees in divine science, the spiritual facts of being, is the great step whereby we sweep away the false evidence for the true, and build the temple, or ​ body, with Truth, whose builder and maker is God, thus consecrating Life no longer “to the unknown God whom therefore ye ignorantly worship,” but to its eternal builder, the everlasting Father, Life without end, that mortal sense cannot innovate or our beliefs destroy. We have tested somewhat the might of metaphysics to master our human misconceptions of being with the Life that is Spirit and not matter, without beginning and without end, forever in the peace of permanence.
We will suppose a jury case on the docket of mind, in which man is charged with liver complaint. The patient feels ill, ruminates, and the trial commences. Personal Sense is plaintiff; Man, the defendant; Belief, the attorney for Personal Sense; Mortal Minds the jury; and Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Mesmerism, and Mediumship the judges. The evidence for the plaintiff being called, testifies: —
“I am Laws of Health, was present on the nights the prisoner (patient) watched with the sick, and, although I have the superintendence of human affairs, was personally abused on those occasions, and informed I must remain silent until called for at this trial, when I should be allowed to testify in the case. Notwithstanding my rules to the contrary, the prisoner watched with the sick every night in the week; “when thirsty, he gave them drink, and when sick, and in prison, he visited them,” at the same time attending to his daily labors, partaking of food at irregular intervals, sometimes retiring immediately after a heavy meal, etc., etc., until he was guilty of liver complaint, that we construe crime, inasmuch as we deem it punishable with death; therefore I arrested the man in behalf of the State ​ (body) and cast him into prison. At the time of the arrest he summoned Physiology, Materia Medica, the felon Mesmerism, and a masked individual named Mediumship, to prevent his punishment or imprisonment. The struggle, on their part, was long; missives of matter were employed vigorously but unavailingly; Materia Medica held out the longest; but at length they all gave up their weapons to me (Laws of Health) and I succeeded in getting Man into close confinement.” The next witness being called, stated: —
“I am Coated Tongue, covered with a foul fur placed on me the night of the liver complaint, Morbid Secretions, Irregular Appetite, Constipation, Foul Stomach, and Debility being witnesses. Morbid Secretions mesmerized the prisoner, took control of his mind, producing somnolence, etc., making him despondent, the sooner to precipitate his fate.” Another witness being called, took the stand and testified: —
“I am Sallow Skin, dry, hot, and chilled by turns since the night of the liver complaint. I have lost my healthy hue and become bad-looking, although nothing on my part occasioned this; I have daily ablutions, and perform my functions as usual, but I am robbed of my good looks.” The next witness testified: —
“I am Nerves, generalissimo of Man, intimately acquainted with the plaintiff, Personal Sense, and know him to be truthful and upright, while Man (the prisoner at the bar) is capable of falsehood. I was witness to the crime of liver complaint; knew the prisoner would commit it, for I convey messages from my residence in matter, alias brains, to the body, and am on intimate terms with Error, a personal acquaintance of ​ the prisoner.” The name of this third person was called for by the court, and the reply was, “Mortality, governor of the State (body) in which Man is supposed to reside.” In this State there is a statute regarding disease, namely, that Man upon whose person disease is found shall be treated as a criminal and punished with death.
Judge. “Did Man, by doing good to his neighbor, possess himself of disease, transgress your laws, and merit punishment?”
“He did.”
The deposition of Bowels was then read, they being too inactive to be present.
Another witness took the stand, and testified as follows: “I am Ulceration; was sent for shortly after the night of the liver complaint, by the Laws of Health, who protested the prisoner had abused him, and my presence was required to make valid his testimony. One of the judges (Materia Medica) was present when I arrived, endeavoring to assist the prisoner to escape from the hands of what he termed justice, alias nature's law; but my sudden appearance with a message from Laws of Health changed his purpose, and he decided at once the prisoner (patient) should die.”
The testimony for the plaintiff (Personal Sense) being closed, Materia Medica arose, and with great solemnity addressed the jury (Mortal Minds), analyzing the offence, reviewing the testimony, and explaining the law relating to liver complaint, the conclusion of which was, that laws of nature render disease homicide. In compliance with a stern duty, Materia Medica said he must charge the jury not to allow their judgment to be warped by the petty suggestions of Soul; to regard in such cases only ​ the mortal evidence of Personal Sense against Man. As the judge proceeded, the prisoner (patient) grew restless, his sallow face blanched with fear, and a look of despair and death settled upon it. A brief consultation ensued, when the jury, Mortal Minds, returned a verdict of guilty, the prisoner being charged with liver complaint in the first degree. Materia Medica then proceeded to pronounce the solemn sentence of death upon the patient, who, for loving his neighbor as himself, was found guilty of benevolence in the first degree, that led to the committal of the second crime, liver complaint, that matter-laws construe homicide; for which crimes we sentence this man to be tortured until he is dead, and may God have mercy on his soul.
The prisoner (patient) was then remanded to his cell (sick-bed) and Theology sent for to prepare Soul, that is immortal, for death, the body, called Man, having no friends. Ah! but Christ, Truth, the friend of Man, could open wide those prison-doors and set the captive free. Swift on the wings of Love there came a despatch, “Delay the execution, the prisoner is not guilty.” Consternation filled the court-room, some exclaiming, “It is contrary to law and order”; others, “Christ walks over our laws, let us follow Him.”
After much debate and opposition, permission was obtained for a trial at the bar of Spirit, where Science should appear as counsel for the poor prisoner. Witnesses, judges, and jurors of the Mental Court of Common Errors were summoned to appear at the bar of Truth. When the case for Man versus Matter opened, his counsel was regarding the prisoner with the utmost tenderness, but the earnest eyes kindling with hope and triumph uplifted for a single ​ moment, turned suddenly to the Mental Court of Common Pleas, and Science opened the argument by saying: “The prisoner at the bar has been sentenced unjustly; his trial was a tragedy, morally illegal. Man has had no counsel in the case; all the testimony was on the side of matter, and we will unearth this foul conspiracy against the liberty and life of Man. The only valid testimony in the case shows the alleged crime was never committed, and the prisoner unworthy of death or of bonds. Your Honor, Materia Medica, has sentenced Man, the image of God, to die, denying justice to the body; you have recommended mercy for Spirit, which is infinite Wisdom and Man's only lawgiver! Here you will please inform us who or what has sinned. Has the body committed a deed? Your counsel, Belief, argues that the body should die, while mortal mind, that alone is capable of sin and suffering, you comfort and commend to mercy. The body committed no offence, and Man, in obedience to higher law, helped his fellow-man, which should result in good to himself. The law of our Supreme Court decrees, “Whoso sinneth shall die”; but good deeds immortalize man, bringing joy instead of grief, pleasure instead of pain, and life instead of death. If liver complaint was induced by trampling on Laws of Health, it was a good deed, for witness is a usurper of Man's liberty and rights, and should be consigned to oblivion. Watching beside the couch of pain in the exercise of Love, that fulfils the whole law, doing unto others as ye would they should do unto you, is no infringement of law, for no demand, human or divine, renders it right to punish a man for doing right. If man sins, our Supreme Judge of equity decides the penalty due to sin; but he can suffer only for sin, ​ and for naught else can he be punished according to the laws of God; then what jurisdiction has your Honor, Materia Medica or Physiology, in the case? ‘Sittest thou to judge a man after the law, and commandest him to be smitten contrary to the law?’ The only jurisprudence to which the prisoner shall submit is Truth, Life, and Love, and if these condemn him not, neither shalt thou condemn him, but shalt restore to him the liberty against which thou hast conspired.
“Your principal witness (Laws of Health) deposed he was an eye-witness to the good deeds for which you sentence a man to die, and betrayed him into the hands of your law, then disappeared on that occasion to reappear on this, against Man, and in support of Personal Sense, a known criminal. The Supreme Court of Spirit, versus matter, finds the prisoner, on the night of the alleged offence, acting within the limits, and in obedience to the above statute, upon which ‘hangs all law and testimony,’ giving a cup of cold water in my name; and laying down his life, he should find it. Such deeds bear the justification, and are under the protection of the Most High. Prior to the night of arrest the prisoner summoned two judges, Materia Medica and Physiology, to prevent his committing liver complaint; but they employed their sheriff, Fear, who handcuffed him, and precipitated the result for which you would now punish Man, leaving him no alternative but to believe your law, fear its consequences, and be punished for it. The judges struggled hard to rescue the prisoner from the penalty they considered justly due; but, failing in this, ordered him to be taken into custody, tried, and condemned; whereupon these abettors appear at the bench to sit in judgment ​ against him, and recommend the jury, Mortal Minds, to find the prisoner guilty. Their Honors sentence Man to die for the offence they compel him to commit; construing obedience to the law of Love disobedience to the law of Life; claiming to wrest Man from the penalty of law at one time, and at another sentencing him according to it.
“One of your principal witnesses, Nerves, testified he is a ruler of the State (body) in which he says Man resides; that he is on intimate terms with the plaintiff, and knows Personal Sense to be just and truthful, but Man, the image of God, a criminal. This is a foul aspersion on his Maker; it blots the fair escutcheon of Intelligence; a malice aforethought to condemn Man in defence of matter. At the Bar of Truth, in the presence of Justice, the judge of our Supreme Court, and before its jurors, Spiritual Senses, I proclaim this witness, Nerves, destitute of Intelligence, without Truth, possessing no reality, and bearing the messages of Error only. Man self-destroyed, the testimony of matter respected, Intelligence not allowed a hearing, Soul a slave recommended to mercy, the body executed — are the terrible records of your Mental Court of Common Pleas.”
Here the opposite counsel, Belief, called Science to order, for contempt of court, and their Honors, Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, and Mediumship, rose to the question of expelling Science from the bar, for high-handed treason, and stopping the judicial proceedings. But Justice, the judge of the Supreme Court of Spirit, overruled their motion, on the ground that unchristian usages are not allowed at the bar of Truth, that holds jurisdiction over the petit Court of Error.
​ Science then read from his own statute, the Bible, remarking it was better authority than Blackstone, extracts from the Rights of Man. “And I give you power over all things, that nothing shall by any means harm you.” “Let us make man in our image, and let him have dominion over all the earth.” “Whoso believeth in me shall not see death,” etc.; proving the witness, Nerves, a perjurer, and instead of a governor of the State (body) wherein man was falsely reported to reside, an insubordinate subject, preferring false claims to office, and bearing false witness against Man. Then turning suddenly to Personal Sense (by this time silent), Science continued, “I order your arrest in the name of Almighty God, on three separate charges: perjury, treason, and conspiracy against the rights and existence of God's image and likeness. Another testimony, equally unimportant, said that a garment of foul fur was spread over this witness, by Morbid Secretions, on the night of the liver-complaint, while the facts in the case showed that this fur was foreign, and imported by Belief, the attorney for Personal Sense, who is in company with Error, and smuggles his goods into market without the inspection of Soul's government officers. Whenever the court of Truth summons Furred Tongue to appear for examination he disappears and is never more heard of. Morbid Secretion is not an importer or dealer in fur, but we have heard his Honor Materia Medica explain how it is manufactured, and know the court is on friendly terms with the firm of Personal Sense and Error, receiving pay for their goods, and introducing them into the market. Also be it known that Belief, counsel for the plaintiff, Personal Sense, is a procurer for this firm; manufactures ​ for it, keeps a furnishing store, and advertises largely for this firm. Ulceration testified that he was absent from the State (body) when a message came from Belief, commanding him to take part in the homicide; at this request he repaired to the spot of liver-complaint, frightened away Materia Medica, who was then manacling the prisoner in his attempts to save him, — an unconscious participator in that for which the Laws of Health had this Man, innocent of all crime in the case, imprisoned, tried, and condemned to die.”
Science then turned from the abashed witnesses, and pointed his words like sharpened steel at the judges, or Materia Medica, Physiology, the felon Mesmerism, and the masked form, Mediumship, saying: “God will smite you, thou whited walls, sitting to judge in justice, but condemning in thine ignorance the prisoner who sought your aid in his struggles against the deed whereof you accuse him, then coming to his rescue only to fasten, through false testimony, an offence on the prisoner of which he is innocent; aiding and abetting that for which you would sacrifice man, declaring your executioner, Disease, to be God's servant and the executor of His laws, when our statute decides your witnesses, jurors, and judges condemned by higher law, and only awaiting the executioner, Progress. We send our very best detectives to whatever locality you report Disease, but, visiting the spot, they learn it was never there, or it could not elude their discovery. Your Mental Court of Errors, at which you condemn or acquit man on the ground of disease, is the oleaginous machinations of your counsel, Belief, that Science arraigns before the supreme bar of Soul, to answer for his bloodshed. You taught Morbid Secretions ​ how to make sleep befool reason, before sacrificing man to your gods; Mortal Minds were mesmerized by your attorney, Belief, and compelled to deliver man to this open-jawed pack. You would transform good deeds into crimes, to which you attach penalties; but no warping of justice renders disobedience to laws of Matter disobedience to God, or an act of homicide.
“Even penal law construes homicide under stress of circumstances justifiable; and what greater justification hath a deed than doing good to our neighbor? Wherefore, then, in the name of outraged Justice, do you sentence Man for ministering to the wants of his fellowman, in obedience to higher law? You cannot walk over the Supreme Bench. Man is amenable to God, who sentences for sin only. The false and unjust beliefs of your mental legislators enact laws of sickness, then render obedience to these laws punishable as crime. In the presence of the supreme lawgiver, standing at the bar of Truth and in accordance with its statutes, I repudiate the false testimony of Personal Sense, forbid his entering more suits against man to be tried at the bar of matter, and appeal to the just and equitable decisions of Spirit to restore the prohibited rights of man.”
Here the counsel for the defence closed, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with benign and imposing presence, appropriating, comprehending, and defining all law and evidence, explained from His statute, the Bible, how law punishing aught but sin is null and void. Also that the plaintiff, Personal Sense, is not permitted to enter suits at the bar of Soul, but required to keep perpetual silence, and, in case of temptation, to give heavy bonds for good behavior. He said the plea of Belief we ​ deem unworthy a hearing on all occasions. Let what it utters, now and forever, fall into oblivion, “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.” According to our statute, Laws of Matter cannot bear witness against man, neither can Fear arrest him, nor Disease cast him into prison; our law refuses to recognize man as sick or dying, but holds him the image and likeness of his Maker. Reversing the testimony of Personal Sense, and the decrees of the Court of Error in favor of Matter versus Man, we decide in favor of Man and against Matter; therefore, we recommend that Materia Medica, Physiology, Laws of Health, Mesmerism, and Mediumship be given a public execution at the hands of our Sheriff, Progress. The Supreme Bench decides in favor of Intelligence, that no law outside of mind can punish Man. Your personal judges of the Mental Court of Common Pleas are chimeras; your attorney, Belief, an impostor, persuading Mortal Minds to return a verdict contrary to law and gospel; while your plaintiff, Personal Sense, is recorded in our Book of books, a perjurer. Our Teacher of spiritual jurisprudence speaks of him, as “a liar from the beginning.” We have no trials for Disease at the tribunals of Spirit, and Man is adjudged innocent of transgressing physical laws because there is no spiritual statute relating thereto. The law of Christ, Truth, is our only code, and “shall not the judge of the whole earth do right?”
The plea of Science closed, the jury of Immortal Mind agreed at once upon a verdict, and there resounded throughout the vast audience-chamber of Soul, “Not guilty”; then the prisoner (patient) rose up strong, free, and glorious. We noticed, as he shook hands with his counsel, Science of Life, all sallowness and debility ​ had disappeared, his form was erect and commanding, his countenance beaming with health and happiness; dominion had taken place of fear, and Man, no longer sick and in prison, walked forth, “whose feet were beautiful upon the mountains.”
The above allegory illustrates the effect of mind on the body, how the testimony of personal sense and the plea of belief would punish man; while the plea of the Science of Being commutes the sentence of error with Truth.
We have seen a dose of truth regarding disease, even the moral and spiritual facts of being, whispered into the thoughts, produce more direct and marked effects on the body than ever we witnessed from taking drugs. Diagnosing disease physically when mind is causation is one of the procurers of disease.
It was once said to us, “The world is benefited by your labors, it feels you without seeing you, but why do you not make yourself more widely known?” Did they know the little time we have to be made known, except through our works, how much time and toil is required to establish the stately results of our system, they could see why. In putting forward this system of ethics and medicine we have wrought alone. The envy and malignancy of certain of our students have endeavored to stop our work, or to plant our metaphysical healing on a false basis. None could take our place, even if they would, and we have remained at our post without change of place or labor for the last eleven years, working for generations, building what cannot be overthrown, but never looking for a reward here. Sordid selfishness, mad ambition, envy, and hate have hounded our steps, or been the Cerberus watching at the gate since ever they saw the ​ great good we had discovered. But we have adhered to Truth, stronger in its hour of detraction than triumph: will others do the same? “The hireling fleeth when the wolf cometh because he is an hireling and careth not for the sheep.” Dishonesty or selfishness never founded a useful system of ethics or a good cause. They may fill the pockets of individuals out of another's labors, and start a short-lived popularity, but they will react to destroy it. Falsehood and hypocrisy build on sand; honesty, Truth, and Love are the only sure foundations whereon to found the science of metaphysics.
The false evidence of the senses, physically, morally, and spiritually, contrast strikingly with the testimony of Soul. The senses say: —
“I am unjust, and no man knoweth it. I can cheat, lie, rob, murder, commit adultery, vent my malice, and with smooth-tongued villanies elude detection and accomplish my purpose. Brutal in propensity, deceived in sentiment, dishonest in purpose, I live my short span to make it one gala-day. What a nice thing is sin, — how it succeeds where goodness fails! What a proud reveller I am! The world is my kingdom. I sit supreme on the throne of matter. But a touch, an accident, and the law of God annihilates me, and all my fancied joys are worse than mortal.”
Here Soul, bearing opposite testimony to the senses, saith: —
“I am the Spirit of man, that giveth understanding, full of unutterable perfections, the beauty of holiness, the wonder of being, imperishable glory, for I am God; grasping and gathering in all bliss, for I am Love; giving immortality to man, for I am Truth; without ​ beginning and without end, for I am Life; supreme over all, for I am Intelligence; and the substance of all, because I Am.” The following valuable testimony to the efficacy of our system is seen in a letter from ex-mayor Atkinson, of Newburyport: —
“To the Editor Of The Globe: —
“We are frequently asked by persons unacquainted with Mrs. M. B. Glover-Eddy, author of ‘Science and Health,’ if we have the pleasure of that lady's acquaintance; if we understand the theory she teaches; and if it is practical and beneficial. To each of these questions we take pleasure in replying that we are well acquainted with the lady. We have taken of her a course of instruction in metaphysics on the treatment of disease, and have found her theory and practice above the ordinary curative method. We have found Mrs. Eddy a lady of pleasing address, high character, conscientious, charitable, and humane. Her teachings are abstract and intricate at first, but simple when their principle is acquired. That her theory is scientific she has ample proof in her demonstration. Her methods and statements of metaphysics are new, and must run the gauntlet as all other truths have done before. Having proved them in our own family we do not hesitate to say they are above all others we have employed, and our experience in this line has not been limited. Her mode of treatment is mental but not mesmeric. She does not claim to have a special gift of healing, but does claim to have the understanding which enables her to heal, and ability to impart that understanding to others, thereby enabling them to ‘go and do likewise.’ We hope she will persevere in her effort to introduce this new system, that by it mankind maybe blessed, and its author receive due credit for her philanthropic labors and her high and noble purpose.
“B. P. Atkinson.
Brevities for Teaching Metaphysics.
Make it clear to the students, in the logic and on the principle of metaphysical science, that all is Mind, there is no matter, that when they commence practice, and would prove the powers of Mind, there will not be to their belief two forces at work and to control, namely, mind and matter, but Mind will be found supreme, and they can prove for themselves that in healing mortal mind they heal its body.
Unfold the latent energies and capacities of the student's mind to a degree of power and the perception of what is possible to Mind that will prevent them from dwarfing their mental resources by employing drugs or hygiene in place of Mind, or in lieu of God, to heal the sick.
Teach the student metaphysics, and then he will see for himself that a creed or doctrine, mediumship or mesmerism, are no parts or integrals of this science, whereas they hide its principle and break its rules until they finally yield to the higher stand-point of Truth. No one is acquainted with metaphysics whose apprehension of its divine principle rises no higher than to suppose that God, infinite Truth, works more for this result when petitioned to bless or to heal mortals. This finite sense of Omnipotence and Love robs our trust in, and true apprehension of, the divine principle of healing, its ever-presence and all-might. It deprives the individual of that faith in the metaphysical principle of healing that comes of understanding God even in part, causing the exercise of less faith in the divine principle of harmony than in the principle of music, which understood and demonstrated has ​ one result, but prayed to would produce no effect in science. Whatever is self-acting and eternal acts without being asked. You render the divine law of healing obscure and void to your own apprehension by limiting in belief, or in any direction, the benevolence, impartiality, and omnipotence of God.
A metaphysician never gives medicine, recommends or trusts in hygiene, or believes in the ocular or the postmortem examination of patients. To consult a clairvoyant and hunt up disease only to chase it down is to make a reality of it in the first instance, and thus trespass directly on the rules and deny the principle of metaphysics. The metaphysician addresses himself to the task of making disease appear unreal to mortal mind; then he should not bring the ipse dixit of clairvoyance to make it appear more real just before he attacks it with the assertion that disease is a belief and error without reality or divine authority. It is not more metaphysical to see disease than to feel it; if you would destroy the sense of disease in feeling you are not to build it up by the sense of seeing. This metaphysical quackery stands on the old platform that there are two principles instead of one to science, and these two are good and evil, diametrically opposed to each other, and yet in partnership, a truth and error at work to produce the results of Truth only. Students of metaphysics, mistaught by some mountebank, have inquired of our students when it was safe to check a fever. When you cannot cure a fever metaphysically after admitting this error of physics, namely, that a fever must run its course. Fearing and admitting the power and necessities of matter never follows with those taught the metaphysical fact that all is ​ Mind. Individuals mistaught have said to us, “We give medicine for certain diseases, to start the recovery of our patients, but finish them up with mind.” Now, what is the principle of that practice, matter or mind? The scientist begins his demonstration on its principle, and has no two principles to govern it. Any other method called science is a perversion and misstatement equivalent to trying with mathematics to multiply eight by four and produce forty, then multiplying eight by five, adding the products, and calling the amount forty, and the process mathematics.
The principle of metaphysics is God, unerring Mind; then to suppose that rhubarb can assist God in curing liver-complaint until the Almighty is able to help Himself is to subvert our metaphysics.
Having suffered sufficiently from charlantanism in materia medica, we desire to keep quackery out of metaphysics. The two-edged sword of Truth must turn in every direction to guard the Tree of Life. Attempting to mingle Truth and error in one mind, and with that mind to heal the sick, is like placing knives in the hands of infants, whose ungoverned movements cause them to wound themselves and others. It is to be hoped that the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, located in Lynn, will afford an arrangement by which students may become safe teachers of metaphysics.