Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/350

338 fatal disease comes from the most hidden, undefined, and insidious belief.

Ignorance of the cause or approach of disease is no argument against its mental origin. You confess to ignorance of the future, and incapacity to preserve your own life, and this belief only precipitates the danger. Such a state of mind induces fear. It is like walking in darkness, on the edge of a precipice. You cannot forget the danger. The fear is present, and your steps are less firm because of the peril.

The history of Christianity furnishes sublime proofs of the supporting influence and protecting power bestowed on man by his Heavenly Father, the omnipotent Mind, who gives him strength to defend himself not only from temptation, but from bodily suffering.

A patient thoroughly booked in medical theories has less sense of the divine power, and is more difficult to heal through Mind, than an aboriginal Indian who never bowed the knee to the Baal of civilization.

The Christian martyrs were prophets of Christian Science. Through the uplifting and consecrating power of Divine Truth they obtained a victory over the senses, a victory that Science alone can explain. Stolidity is an opposite state of mortal mind, and suffers less, because it knows less, of material law.

If Mind is the only actor, how can mechanism be automatic? Mortal mind constructs a machine, manages it, and then calls it material. A mill at work, or the action of a water-wheel, are effects. Their primary cause is mortal mind. Without this mind the body is devoid of action, and this deadness shows where the life was, — in the cause, not the effect.