Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/247

Rh bodily presence of his healer, for the healer's mind can work upon the mind of his patient equally well, be he absent or present. Absent treatment is, therefore, regularly practised in Christian Science.

Despite Mrs. Glover's protest against all "knowledge," she seemed to admit that her healers should know something of physiology and materia medica, sufficient, at least, to recognise symptoms and to understand the names of both symptoms and diseases. "When healing mentally," she wrote, "call each symptom by name, and contradict its claims, as you would a falsehood uttered to your injury," for "if you call not the disease by name, when you address it mentally, the body will no more respond by recovery than a person will reply whose name is not spoken; and you can not heal the sick by argument, unless you get the name of the disease." That is, if a patient happened to be labouring under the belief that he was afflicted with yellow fever, and the lay healer, whose knowledge of medical science is, by the terms of his religion, as limited as he can possibly make it, did not recognise the disease, and was ignorant of its name, then the healer could not heal, and Truth would stand powerless while the patient died of this rare and unfamiliar belief.

In the contemplation of death, Mrs. Glover did not weaken in theory. Death is the great and final test of Christian Science. It is, she said, "the last enemy to be overcome," and "much is to be understood before we gain this great point in science." Healers must "never consent to the death of man, but rise to the supremacy of spirit." But whether or not they consent to it, Mrs. Glover recognised that death, although false,