Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/345

Rh It is our ignorance of God, the Divine Principle, that produces the apparent discord; and the right understanding of Him restores harmony.

A blundering despatch, mistakenly announcing the death of your friend, occasions the same grief that his real death would bring. You think your anguish is occasioned by your loss. Another despatch, correcting the mistake, heals that grief, and you learn that your suffering was merely 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, and Divine Wisdom is then understood. Belief, not Truth, produces all the suffering on earth.

If a Scientist had said, while you were laboring under the influence of this belief, “Your sorrow is without cause,” you would not have understood him, although the correctness of the assertion might be afterwards proven to you. So when our friends really depart, and we lament, that lamentation is needless and causeless. We shall know this to be true, when we grow into the understanding of Life.

You say, “I have burned my finger.” This is an exact statement, more exact than you suppose, for mortal mind, and not matter, burns it. Holy inspiration has created states of mind that nullify the action of the flames, as in the case of the three Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion.

All disease arises, like other mental conditions, from association, and from connection with the thoughts of others. It being a law of mortal mind that certain diseases should be contagious, this law obtains credit