Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/366

354 The physical effects of fear illustrate its bad influence on the body. Gazing long and helplessly at a lion, crouched for a spring upon you, would you not suffer and feel weak? The body is not more affected by animal fear than it is by the images of disease held before the mind that is ignorant of metaphysics. Unless such a cause of terror is removed from contemplation, the senses will at length be paralyzed into the belief which men call death. Nothing but the power of Truth can prevent a fatal result from either cause, if the occasion continue; but that power can prove man's dominion over the beasts of the field and the fear of disease.

Without fear there can be no inflammatory or torpid action of the system. Remove the fear, and you destroy its effects. By looking a tiger fearlessly in the eye, Sir Charles Napier sent him cowering back into the jungle.

Sir Humphry Davy cured a case of paralysis by simply introducing a thermometer into the patient's mouth, — which he did in order to ascertain the temperature of the body, — the patient supposing that this ceremony was to heal him. If half the attention given to hygiene were given to the study of Christian Science, and its elevation of thought, this alone would usher in the millennium.

Bathing and rubbing, to alter the secretions, or remove unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle, receive a useful rebuke from Christian Healing. We must beware of making clean the outside of the platter only.

A hint may be taken from the Irish emigrant, whose filth does not affect his happiness, when mind and body rest on the same basis. To the mind equally gross,