Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/416

396 Suffering is no less a mental condition than enjoyment is. You cause bodily sufferings, and increase

them, by admitting their reality and continuance, as directly as you enhance your joys, by believing them to be real and continuous- When an accident happens, you think, or exclaim, “I am hurt!” Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real.

Now reverse the process. Declare you are not hurt, and understand the reason why; and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to God, as all which the Scriptures have declared Him to be.

To heal the sick, one must be familiar with the great verities of Being. Mortal mind is no more material

in our waking hours than it is when it acts, walks, sees, hears, enjoys, or suffers in a dream. We can never treat mortal mind and matter separately, because they combine as one. Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly, understanding yourselves and your Maker better than before.

Sometimes Jesus called a disease by name, as when he said to the epileptic boy, “Thou dumb and deaf spirit,

I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.” It is added that “the spirit [demon] rent him sore and came out of him, and he was as one dead,” — clear evidence that the malady was not material. These instances show the concessions which Jesus was willing to make to the popular