Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/432

412 time, that such ills may be reproduced in the very ailments feared. A child can have worms, if you say so, — or any other malady, timorously holden in the beliefs of those about him, relative to his body. Thus are laid the foundations of the belief in disease and death, and children are educated into discord.

The treatment of insanity is especially interesting. However obstinate the case, it yields more naturally

than most diseases to the salutary action of Truth, which counteracts error. The leading arguments to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases: namely, the impossibility that matter should control mind, or suffer; the need of mortal mind to be guided by Truth; the fact that Christ is Truth, and Truth can establish a healthy state, and destroy all error, whether that error be called physical or mental, dementia or dysentery.

To fix Truth steadfastly in your patients' thoughts, explain Christian Science to them; but not too soon, —

not until your patients are prepared for it, — lest you array the sick against their own interests, by troubling and perplexing thought. The Mind-healer's argument rests on the Christianly Scientific basis of Being. The Scripture declares that “God [Good] is all, and there is none beside Him.” Even so, harmony is universal, and discord is unreal. Christian Science declares that Mind is Substance, but that matter neither feels, suffers, nor enjoys. Hold these points strongly in view. Keep in mind the verities of Being, — that man is the image and likeness of God, in whom all Being is painless and permanent. Remember that man's perfection is real and