Page:Science and Health.djvu/197

Rh honest, high, and God-given purpose. Sin is thought before it is deed, and you must master it in the first, or it conquers you in the second instance. Jesus said, to look with foul desire on forbidden objects, breaks a moral precept; hence, the stress he laid on the character of a man that is hidden from our perception. Evil thoughts reach farther, and do more harm than individual crimes, for they impregnate other minds and fashion your body. The atmosphere of impure desires, like the atmosphere of earth, is restless, ever in motion, and calling on some object; this atmosphere is laden with mental poison, and contaminates all it touches. When malicious purposes, evil thoughts, or lusts, go forth from one mind, they seek others, and will lodge in them unless repelled by virtue and a higher motive for being. All mental emanations take root and bear fruit after their own kind. Consider, then, the guilt of nurturing evil and impure thoughts, that send broadcast discord and moral death. Sooner suffer a doctor infected with small-pox to be about you, than come under the treatment of one that manipulates his patients' heads, and is a traitor to science.

These points are so vital to the success of all learning to heal the sick in the science of being, we hesitate not to name them, even as we urge their importance when teaching, and we never withdraw aid or interest from a student unless we have found him unworthy his place. Through a metaphysical mode of healing, patients cannot be made harmonious by a dishonest or impure-minded practitioner; it is the Truth of being that heals in science, and who will say this doctor possesses it? We have classified sickness, error, and to destroy
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