Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/348

336 childishly than her child, “Mamma knows you are hurt.” The more successful treatment is to say, “Oh nonsense [no-sense material], you're not hurt; you only think you are.” Presently the child forgets all about the accident, and is at play again.

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are shocking substitutes for the dignity and potency of Mind, and its divine power to heal. It is pitiful to lead men into temptation through the byways of physiology and Materia medica. To victimize the race with intoxicating prescriptions for the sick — until mortal mind acquires an educated appetite for strong drinks, and men and women are made loathsome sots — is not only unchristian, but inhuman.

The physical affirmation of disease should always be met with the mental negation. Whatever the mind desires to produce on the body it should express mentally, and hold fast to this ideal.

If you have sound and capacious lungs, and want them to remain so, be always ready with the mental protest against the opposite belief. Discard all notions about lungs, tubercles, or hereditary consumption, arising from any circumstance, and you will find that Mind, self-consciously assured of its power, can steer the body into health or sickness, as directly as it can forbid the feet to walk or impel the hands to steal.

Through fear the body becomes suddenly weak or abnormally strong, showing mortal mind to be the producer of strength or weakness. A sudden shock from fear or grief has caused instantaneous death. Because fear originates in the unconscious mortal mind, it produces disease or death involuntarily. I never knew a patient who did not recover when the fear of the disease