Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/256

244 produces more sickness. Fear, conjecture, and dismay are the mental elements of all disease. Science must go over the whole ground, and dig up every seed of their sowing. A spirit-medium relics on belief. Science removes belief with understanding; and it rests on Principle, instead of person, for the revelation of immortality and the introduction of the harmony of being.

A medium said to me: “You are ill. The brain is overtasked, and you must have rest.” I interposed a vigorous objection, contending for the rights of Intelligence, and asserted that Mind controls body and brain. The views she insisted upon (as I told her) were the very ones to be rid of, in order to be well. She exclaimed, “Dr. Rush is present, and says you must use valganism [meaning, undoubtedly, galvanism] and rest, or you will be sick.” Even this oracular warning failed to convince me, and so I continued in a good state of health. Indeed I had strong doubts whether fifty years of post-mortem experience could so demoralize the orthography of a learned man, or would so perpetuate his old medical beliefs. People who are rational on other topics sustain and believe such mummery as this, while at the same time they loudly admonish the world against Christian Science as dangerous.

A communication, purporting to come from the late Theodore Parker, read as follows: “There never was, and there never will be, an immortal spirit.” Yet the very periodical containing this sentence repeats weekly the assertion that spirit-communications are our only proofs of immortality.

I entertain no doubt of the humanity and philanthropy of many Spiritualists, but I cannot coincide with their views.