Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/67

Rh manifests your belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this belief a boil. Now administer

mentally to your patient a high attenuation of truth on this subject, and it will soon cure the boil. The fact that pain cannot exist where there is no mortal mind to feel it, is a proof that this so-called mind makes its own pain, — that is, its own belief in pain.

We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have smallpox because others have it; but

mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection. When this mental contagion is understood, we shall be more careful of our company; and we shall avoid the loquacious tattler about disease, as we should the advocate of crime. Neither sympathy nor society should ever tempt us to hear about error; and certainly we should not be its advocate.

Disease arises, like other mental conditions, from association. It being a law of mortal mind that certain diseases should be regarded as contagious, this law obtains credit, through association, — calling up the fear that creates the image of disease, and its consequent manifestation in the body.

This fact in metaphysics is illustrated by the following incident. A gentleman was made to believe that he

occupied a bed where a cholera patient had died. Immediately the symptoms of this disease appeared in him, and he died. The fact was, that he had not caught the cholera by material contact, because no such patient had been in that bed.

If a child is exposed to contagion or infection, the mother is frightened, and says, “My child will be sick.”