Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/392

376 thought a hopeless state, an image more terrifying than that of most other diseases. The patient turns involuntarily from the contemplation of it, but though unacknowledged, the latent fear and the despair of recovery remain in thought.

Just so is it with the greatest sin. It is the most subtle, and does its work almost self-deceived. The diseases

deemed dangerous sometimes come from the most hidden, undefined, and insidious beliefs. The pallid invalid, whom you declare to be wasting away with consumption of the blood, should be told that blood never gave life and can never take it away, — that Life is Spirit, and that there is more life and immortality in one good motive and act, than in all the blood which ever flowed through mortal veins and simulated a corporeal sense of life.

If the body is material, it cannot, for that very reason, suffer with a fever. Because the so-called material body

is a mental concept and governed by mortal mind, it manifests only what that so-called mind expresses. Therefore the efficient remedy is to destroy the patient's false belief by both silently and audibly arguing the true facts in regard to harmonious being, — representing man as healthy instead of diseased, and showing that it is impossible for matter to suffer, to feel pain or heat, to be thirsty or sick. Destroy fear, and you end fever. Some people, mistaught as to Mind-science, inquire when it will be safe to check a fever. Know that in Science you cannot check a fever after admitting that it must have its course. To fear and admit the power of disease, is to paralyze mental and scientific demonstration.