Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/138

118 illusion, a phantasm of mortal mind, diminishing as we better apprehend our spiritual existence, and ascend the ladder of Life.

This woman learned that food neither strengthens nor weakens the body, though mortal mind has its material methods of doing this work, one of which is to declare that proper food supplies nutriment and strength to the human system. She learned also that mortal mind makes a mortal and sickly body, because it governs it with mortal opinions.

Food had less power to help or to hurt her, after she availed herself of the fact that Mind governs man, and she had less faith in the so-called pleasures and pains of matter. Taking less thought about what she should eat or drink, consulting the stomach less and God more about the economy of living, she recovered strength and flesh rapidly. For many years she had been kept alive, as was believed, only by the strictest adherence to hygiene and drugs, and yet she continued ill all the time. Now she dropped drugs and hygiene, and was well.

She learned that a dyspeptic was very far from the image and likeness of God, — having “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,” — if eating a bit of animal flesh could overpower her. She finally concluded that God never made a dyspeptic; while fear, hygiene, physiology, and physicians had made her one, contrary to His commands.

The cure alike for dyspepsia and sin is to consult matter not at all, and to eat what is set before you,

“asking no questions for conscience' sake.” We must destroy the false belief that life and intelligence are in matter, and plant ourselves