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54 Unless muscles are self-acting at all times, they are never so, — never capable of acting contrary to mental direction. If muscles can cease to act, and become rigid of their own preference, — be deformed or symmetrical, as they please, or as disease directs, — they must be self-directing. Why then consult anatomy to learn how mortal mind governs muscle, if we are only to learn from anatomy that muscle is not so governed?

Is man a material fungus, without Mind to help

him? Is a stiff joint or contracted muscle as natural a result of law as the supple and elastic condition of the healthy limb, and is God the lawgiver?

You say, “I have burned my finger.” This is an exact statement, more exact than you suppose; for mortal mind, and not matter, burns it. Holy

inspiration has created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion.

In 1880 Massachusetts put her foot on a proposed tyrannical law, restricting the practice of medicine. If her

sister States follow this example, in harmony with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, they will do less violence to that immortal sentiment of the Declaration, “Man is endowed by his Maker with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The oppressive State statutes touching medicine remind one of those words of the famous Madame Roland, as she knelt to a statue of the Goddess of Liberty,