Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/347

Rh mortal mind, any circumstance is of itself powerless to produce suffering. It is the latent belief in disease, and the fear of it, that associate sickness with a certain circumstance, and cause the two to appear conjoined, even as poetry and music are reproduced as one in human memory.

Not perceiving the vital points of metaphysics, not seeing how mortal mind affects the body, — acting beneficially or injuriously on health, as well as on the morals and the happiness of mortals, — we are misled in our methods. We throw the mental influence on the wrong side, thereby actually injuring those whom we mean to bless.

Suffering is no less a mental condition than enjoyment. You cause bodily sufferings, and increase them, by admitting their reality and continuance, as directly as you enhance your joys by believing them to be real and continuous. When an accident happens you think, or exclaim, “I am hurt!” Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real.

Now reverse the process. Declare you are not hurt, and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your fidelity to Christian Science, and to your disbelief in physics. Such a fact illustrates and demonstrates our theories.

That mother is not a Christian Scientist, and her affections need better aids, who says to her child: “You look sick,” or “You look tired;” “You need rest,” or “You need medicine.”

Such a mother runs to her little one, who has hurt her face by falling on the carpet, and says, moaning more