Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/401

Rh is right; but he should understand that while arguing the nothingness of error, I do so for the purpose of bringing out the great somethingness of Truth, — health, harmony, and holiness. Therefore my method is not “fraught with falsities painful to behold.”

My critic must admit that discord is no thing. I name it error (because that is the nearest to nothing) and I doctor it with Truth. I do this as one would waken the dreamer from a nightmare. Note that to awake from a dream, and know that it is a dream, is for the dreamer to be relieved of the terror under which he has labored, and to be cured immediately. So when a sufferer is convinced that there is no pain, because matter is nonexistent, how can he possibly suffer longer? Do you suffer the pain of tooth-pulling when you are under the influence of nitrous-oxide gas? Yet the tooth and the operation and the forceps are unchanged.

My critic, dreaming that matter and error are something, needs to be wakened, so as to behold their nothingness. Then sickness and sin would disappear to his vision. The right would appear to be the real, and the inharmonious the unreal. He would see that discord is indeed the nothingness which he chides me for talking about, and which I neither honor nor fear.

Medicine virtually admits the nothingness of hallucinations, even while treating them as disease; and who objects to this? Ought we not, then, to laud any cure effected by making the disease appear to be — what it really is — an illusion?

Here is the difficulty, that generally it is not understood that one disease is just as much a delusion as another. It is a pity that the medical faculty and