Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/135

Rh the first century healed the sick as a token of their Christianity. Has Christianity improved upon its earlier records, or has it retrograded? Compare the lives of its professors with those of its followers at the beginning of the Christian era, and you have the correct answer.

As a pertinent illustration of the general subject under discussion, I will cite a modern phase of medical practice, namely, the homœopathic system, to which the old school has become reconciled. Here I speak from experience. In homœopathy, the one thousandth attenuations and the same triturations of medicine have not an iota of the drug left in them, and the lower attenuations have so little that a vial full of the pellets can be swallowed without harm and without appreciable effect. Yet the homœopathist administers half a dozen or less of these same globules, and he tells you, and you believe him, that with these pellets he heals the sick. The diminishing of the drug does not disprove the efficiency of the homœopathic system. It enhances its efficiency, for it identifies this system with mind, not matter, and places it nearer the grooves of omnipotence. O petty scorner of the infinite, wouldst thou mock God's miracles or scatter the shade of one who “shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty”? If, as Scripture declares, God made all that was made, then whatever is entitled to a classification as truth or science must be comprised in a knowledge or understanding of God, for there can be nothing beyond illimitable divinity.

The homœopathist handles in his practice and heals the most violent stages of organic and inflammatory diseases, stops decomposition, removes enteritis, gastritis, hyperæmia, pneumonia, diphtheria, and ossification — the effects