Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/113

Rh price for human knowledge! But the price does not exceed the original cost. God said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”

The less there is said of physical structure and laws,

and the more there is thought and said about moral and spiritual law, the higher the standard of mortals will be, and the farther they will be removed from imbecility of mind and body.

We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers, in the departments of knowledge now broadcast in the earth, which made them more hardy than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians.

We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate assisted to make them healthy; but that is a

mistake. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head, and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics. Many effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until individual opinions improve, and mortal belief loses some portion of its error.

The doctor's mind reaches his patient's. He should suppress his fear of disease, or his belief in its reality

and fatality will harm his patients more than his calomel and morphine, inasmuch as the higher stratum of mortal mind is more potent to injure than its lower substratum, matter. A patient hears the doctor's verdict as a criminal hears his death-sentence. He may seem calm under it, but he is not. His fortitude may sustain him, but his fear has already developed the disease which is gaining the mastery.