Science & Health - Key to the Scriptures. Mary Baker Eddy

to the facts as I have stated them. I confess my own astonishment. I did not expect so much, even from Mrs. Eddy, especially as I had suffered before very severely in childbirth. The physician covered me with extra bed-clothes, charged me to be very careful about taking cold and to keep quiet, and then went away. I think he was alarmed at my having no labor-pains, but before he went out I had an ague coming on. When the door closed behind him, Mrs. Eddy threw off the extra coverings and said, “It is nothing but the fear produced by the doctor that causes these chills.” They left me at once. She told me to sit up when I chose, and to eat whatever I wanted. My babe was born about two o'clock in the morning, and the following evening I sat up several hours. I ate whatever the family did. I had a boiled dinner of meat and vegetables the second day. I made no difference in my diet, except to drink gruel between meals, and never experienced the least inconvenience from this course. I dressed myself the second day, and the third day felt unwilling to lie down. In one week I was about the house and was well, running up and down stairs and attending to domestic duties. For several years I had been troubled with prolapsus uteri, which disappeared entirely after Mrs. Eddy's wonderful demonstration of Christian Science at the birth of my babe.

      Miranda R. Rice.

      Lynn, Mass., 1874.

      No system of hygiene but mine is purely mental. The falsehoods of disappointed fame-seekers relative to this established fact and the history of my discovery are insignificant and malicious. Evans's books were in circulation when my book was published, but they advocated the power of the earth's currents and animal magnetism to regulate life and health.

      There has arisen among men another signally false witness, — a charity scholar, whom I found to be a depraved infidel, — one, too, vitally disappointed about “who shall be greatest;” unwilling that this solemn question, belonging alone to God, should rest with Him, after vehement public and epistolatory protestations of devotion to my system, preaching and praying in apparent good faith with it, he took the field against it, having learned that he must become an honest man before he could be a Christian Scientist. This quenched his entire zeal, and he returned to his vomit, Philosophical Realism. He has since become the special advocate of every villain who is defrauding the people by spurious claims to orthodox Mind-healing.

      Science reverses the testimony of the senses; and by this reversion mortals arrive at truth; then if these senses declare a man in good health, he is sick, is he? Health is not a condition of matter, and the material senses can bear no testimony. The Science of Mind-healing shows it is impossible for aught but Mind to testify, or to exhibit the real status of man; hence, Science, reversing the testimony of the senses, reveals man's habitual harmony, and overthrows the false evidence or syllogism. Science is Mind, not matter. Any conclusion predicated of sensation in matter, or matter conscious either of health or disease, — instead of reversing the testimony of the senses, confirms it as legitimate. Science rests on fixed Principle not relegated by a false sense.

      Both the major and minor propositions of a syllogism may be true, and the conclusion false. Science affirms no discords. Reverse the testimony, pro or con, of the material senses, and you have the opposite spiritual fact in Science.

      Not a blade of grass springs up, not a spray buddeth within the vale, not a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, not a flower starts from its cloistered cell, but Mind causes it. To suppose that God constitutes laws of discord, or institutes penalties without law, is a mistake.

      Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven. If we concede the same reality to discord as to harmony, it has as lasting a claim upon us. If evil is as real as good, it is as immortal. If death is as real as Life, immortality is a myth. If pain is as real as the absence of pain, both must be immortal; and if so, harmony cannot be the fact of being.

      The Mohammedan believes in a pilgrimage to Mecca. Another believes that drugs save life. The first is a religious delusion, the second is a medical delusion.

      Disease is like the dream of sleep, wherein the suffering is wholly in mortal mind; yet the dreamer thinks he has a body, and the suffering is in that body.

      The smile of the sleeper indicates the sensation produced physically by the pleasure of a dream. So pain and pleasure, sickness and care, are traced in unmistakable signs upon the face.

      Sickness is a growth of error, springing from a seed of thought, — either your own thought or another's. The soil of disease is mortal mind, and you have a crop abundant or scanty, according to the seedlings in that soil, by whomsoever placed there.

      Anatomy, physiology, treatises on health, — sustained by what is termed material law, — are the husbandmen of sickness and disease. It is proverbial that as long as you read medical works you will be sick. The sedulous matron — studying her Jahr, at hand with homœopathic pellet and powder, ready to put you into a sweat, to move the bowels, or to produce sleep — is sowing the seed of sickness day and night, and her household will erelong reap the reward of this error.

      The descriptions of disease by clairvoyants and medical charlatans, quacks alike with mind and matter, are the prolific sources of sickness. They are the principal manufacturers of disease and death. They first help to form the image of illness in mortal minds, by telling patients that they have a disease; and then they go to work to destroy that disease. They unweave their own webs; while sufferers are satisfied to see their supposed curers busy, and to pay them for both making sickness and trying to heal it. This is “the seed within itself,” spoken of in the Bible, “bearing fruit after its kind.”

      Doctors deport themselves generally as if there were no Mind, and they had taken the ground, contrary to metaphysics, that all is matter. Ignorant that the human mind governs the body through belief, they hesitate not to poison this fount of fear with more fear. They form disease in thought by declaring it a fixed fact, even before they go to work to eradicate it with the material faith which they inspire. They first poison the mortal thought with fear, and then would offset mind-poison with the poison of matter.

      Delusion is all that ever enabled a drug to cure the ailments of a man. Anatomy admits that mind is somewhere in mortals, though out of sight. Then, if a man is sick, why doctor the body alone, and deal a dose of despair to mind? Why declare that the body is diseased, and picture the disease to the mind, holding it before the physician's and the patient's thought, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel? We should understand that the cause of disease rests with the mortal human mind, and its cure with the immortal Divine Mind; and we should prevent the images of disease from taking form in thought, as well as efface the forms of disease already located in the human mind.

      Because Science is at war with physics, even as Truth is at war with error, the old schools will oppose it. When there were fewer doctors, and less thought was given to sanitary subjects, there were better constitutions and less disease. In olden times, who ever heard of dyspepsia, cerebro-spinal meningitis, hay-fever, and rose-cold?

      What an abuse of nature to say that a rose, the smile of God, can produce suffering. The joy of its presence, its beauty and modesty, should uplift the thought and destroy any possible fever. It is profane to fancy that the sweetness of clover and breath of new-mown hay may cause, like snuff, sneezing and nasal pangs.

      If a random thought bad called itself dyspepsia, and appeared to our forefathers, it would have died at the hands of benevolence and industry. Then people had less time to be selfish, to confine thought to the body, to spend in sickly after-dinner talk. The exact amount of food the stomach could digest was not discussed à la Cutter, or considered a law of the human mind. A man's belief in those days was not so severe upon the gastric juices. Beaumont's Experiments did not govern the digestion.

      The action of mind on the body was not so injurious before the curing and curious Eves embraced medical works, and the unmanly Adams charged their falls, and the fate of their offspring, upon the credulity of their wives.

      The primitive privilege, to take no thought about food, left the stomach and bowels free to act in obedience to nature, and gave the gospel a chance to be seen in its glorious effects upon the body. A ghastly array of diseases was not kept before the imagination. Fewer books on digestion, and more “sermons in stones and good in everything,” gave better health and greater longevity to our