Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/177

Rh 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 have been 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 the words of the famous Madame Roland, as she knelt before a statue of Liberty, erected near the guillotine: “Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”

The ordinary practitioner, examining bodily symptoms, telling the patient that he is sick, and treating the case according to his physical diagnosis, would naturally

induce the very disease he is trying to cure, even if it were not already determined by mortal mind. Such unconscious mistakes would not occur, if this old class of philanthropists looked as deeply for cause and effect into mind as into matter. The physician agrees with his “adversary quickly,” but upon different terms