Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/44

32 mind and body. They treat the sick as if there were but one factor in the case, and that one body, without mind.

There is an old riddle in natural history — Which was first, the egg or the bird? To match the ancient question, I propose this modern one: Which was first, Mind or medicine? If Mind was first, and self-existent, then Spirit, not matter, must have been the first medicine. It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, or obtain them for human use; else Jesus also would have recommended and employed them in his healing.

Mind being first, it made medicine; but the medicine was Mind. It could not have been that which departs from the nature of Mind. Truth is God's medicine for error of every sort. The human mind would use error as a medicine, and take the greater evil to cure the less. It would appease malice with revenge, and quiet pain with morphine. Of two evils, it chooses the greater. The Divine Mind never called matter medicine, or made it so; and matter required a material and human belief before it could be considered as medicine.

Omnipotent Mind could not possibly create a remedy beyond itself. Erring, finite, human mind needs something besides itself. So it believes in something else, and raises matter into a god; for the human mind was an idolater from the beginning, having other gods and more than the One Mind.

Here you see how sense makes its own idols, names them matter, worships them. With pagan pride it has attributed to a material god of medicine an ability