Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/121

Rh The hands, without mortal mind to direct them, could not commit a murder.

Courts and juries judge and sentence mortals in order to restrain crime, to prevent deeds of violence or to punish

them. To say that these tribunals have no jurisdiction over the carnal or mortal mind, would be to contradict precedent and to admit that the power of human law is restricted to matter, while mortal mind, evil, which is the real outlaw, defies justice and is recommended to mercy. Can matter commit a crime? Can matter be punished? Can you separate the mentality from the body over which courts hold jurisdiction? Mortal mind, not matter, is the criminal in every case; and human law rightly estimates crime, and courts reasonably pass sentence, according to the motive.

When our laws eventually take cognizance of mental crime and no longer apply legal rulings wholly to physical

offences, these words of Judge Parmenter of Boston will become historic: “I see no reason why metaphysics is not as important to medicine as to mechanics or mathematics.”

Whoever uses his developed mental powers like an escaped felon to commit fresh atrocities as opportunity

occurs is never safe. God will arrest him. Divine justice will manacle him. His sins will be millstones about his neck, weighing him down to the depths of ignominy and death. The aggravation of error foretells its doom, and confirms the ancient axiom: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

The distance from ordinary medical practice to Christian Science is full many a league in the line of light; but to go in healing from the use of