Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/212

196 If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force. Man has “sought out many inventions,” but he has not yet found it true that knowledge can save him from the dire effects of knowledge. The power of mortal mind over its own body is little understood.

Better the suffering which awakens mortal mind from

its fleshly dream, than the false pleasures which tend to perpetuate this dream. Sin alone brings death, for sin is the only element of destruction.

“Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” said Jesus. A careful study of this text shows that here the word soul means a false sense or material consciousness. The command was a warning to beware, not of Rome, Satan, nor of God, but of sin. Sickness, sin, and death are not concomitants of Life or Truth. No law supports them. They have no relation to God wherewith to establish their power. Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven.

Such books as will rule disease out of mortal mind, —

and so efface the images and thoughts of disease, instead of impressing them with forcible descriptions and medical details, — will help to abate sickness and to destroy it.

Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post mortem examination, — not from infection nor from contact with material virus, but from the fear of the disease and from the image brought before the mind; it is a mental state, which is afterwards outlined on the body.

The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by