Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/352

340 as gas when it evaporates, but for the belief that inflammation and pain must accompany it.

Chills and fever are often the form in which fear manifests itself. Change the mental state, and the chills and fever disappear. Even a mesmerist can prove this, but a Christian Scientist can never prove it in the same way. The mesmerist scares his subject into quaking, though the victim knows not what is frightening him. The Scientist removes the terror, stops the shaking, and is incapable of producing the fear. Truth punishes sin, but cannot produce either sin or sickness.

The patient may tell you that he has a humor in the blood, a scrofulous diathesis. His parents have believed that before him, or some of his progenitors farther back. Now mortal mind, not matter, forms that conclusion and its results. You will have humors just as long as you believe them to be either safety-valves, or mentally ineradicable.

A corrupt mind is manifested in a corrupt body. Lust, malice, and all sorts of evil, are diseased beliefs, and you can only destroy them by destroying the wicked motives which produced them. If the evil has ended in the conscious mortal mind, while its effects still remain on the unconscious, you can remove this disorder only as God's law is fulfilled, when punishment has cancelled the crime.

Fear, whether it arise from ignorance or malice, is the whole of disease. You can cure the fear that is occasioned by ignorance; but you cannot remove the fearful effects produced by sin, so long as sinful motives or desires remain.

A mental state of self-condemnation and guilt, or a faltering and doubting trust in Truth, are unsuitable