The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-11-07

of his painful experience. Therefore one of the things the sick man needs to know is that his Maker is not a party to his undoing, not in the re- motest degree. He needs to know that since infinite intelligence in it's very nature could not be the author of such a discordant thing as sickness. and since if God be omnipotent, the only power, and there is therefore no other power that could be it's author, the basis then of sickness, like ignorance and other forms of evil, must be non- entity, or negation, not something, but the absence or lack of something.
 - In this way the sick man may learn that disease is not the result of any real law, but Is the expression, mani festation, or effect of certain erron- eous modes or habits of human belief, which though they may have been for ages formulating and fastening them selves upon an apparently helpless humanity are found on examination to be utterly unlawful and abnormal, and without justification other than that mankind for a long time has been assenting and submitting to them
 To illustrate: It has not infrequent- ly occurred that the people of a state or nation for years have permitted themselves to be governed by an enactment which they supposed to be a law, but which when finally tested in their higher courts has been dis cerned to- be not a law, but an un- warranted assumption of power and authority. There never had been real occasion for any one to yield obedi- ence to it's terms, and those who did SO, in following the line of common consent, and who suffered inconven- fence and loss thereby, were at no time suffering from the workings of law, but always and only from their erroneous submission to that which was not a law at all but the absence of law, a negation. Had these people been better informed they would have been disposed to resist rather than to submit. Resistance would have been of little avail however, unless con- dueted on intelligent and well-d defined lines. Thus, if those who first dis cerned the fa1sity of this so-called law had undertaken merely to defy it., without establishing their right to do so, they doubtless would have invited more trouble than they were for the time being capable of meeting.
 Orderly Resistance to False Law
 Christian Science discloses to its students that the accumulated beliefs of the human mind commonly known as laws of health, but which might be termed more appropriately laws of disease, are not really laws, being di- ectly at variance with the divine and true law, and therefore in their final analysis utterly impotent and void. The Christian Scientist, therefore knows he has a right to resist, but he also knows that mere blind resistance is not effective. In becoming a Chris ton Scientist, therefore, it is not nec- essary for one to assume an attitude of strutting about with a chip on ones shoulder challenging cold drafts, germs, accidents, neighborhood opin- ion, and other unpleasant things, to do their worst.
 The genuine Christian Scientist is not a queer or spectacular person. He does not seek trouble, though when trouble arrives he usually finds he can meet it with less fear than before, and with an altogether better demon stration of the dominion over evil that is a natural, attribute of mans real self. The method the Christian Scien- tist employs fer annulling unjust enactments with regard to health is an orderly method, in which the be- ginning is not mistaken for the end- ing, nothing is assumed or taken for granted, nor is step number two at tempted until step number one has been mastered. The factors that cause the human body to respond with percentage of similar symptoms under similar circumstances, and which be- cause of this tendency have been mis- takenly supposed to be the result of some material or physical law, but which Christian Science shows to be primarily mental factors, the fruit of perhaps centuries of wrong thinking, may not because of this be dismissed as with wave of the hand. Nor does Christian Science attempt to do any, thing of that sort. There must be systematic and thorough undoing of the false mental processes by which these conditions have come about. One may evade the issue, as it were, by drugging the pain or patching up the bodily effects of sick thoughts, and thus for the day or the week or the year obtain a kind of immunity, but such a course can be of but tenn porary advantage at best.
 Look Back of Material Effects.
 It is observed in this connection that all systems of treatment for the sick take more or less account of the fact that a diseased condition of the body as it appears to the physical senses is only the effect of something else, but as rule these systems are content to discern cause possibly but not a whit less physical than the outward manifestation of the disease. Such a so-called cause is itself only an effect Correctly speaking, noth- ing in or of the material body could be the cause of disease, for matter cannot do anything of and by itself. Matter does not have initiative or cannot make itself sick or we'll, weak or strong, alive or dead Matter is always subjective. The things it ap- pears to do are done always by some thing else. If a dozen bricks be plac- ed on end in a row, with regular in- tervals between, and brick number one be toppled against brick number two, all the bricks in the row will one by one fall. Number twelve brick clearly was knocked over by number eleven, which in turn fell because of number ten, and so on back to num- Der one, and to the hand that toppl- ed it.. Material effects every one of tboro what made the hand tn