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

When the mechanism of the human mind goes on undisturbed by fear, selfishness, or malice, disease cannot enter and gain a foothold.

      Damp atmospheres and freezing snows may have empurpled the round cheeks of our ancestors, but they never reached the refinement of inflamed bronchial tubes; because they were as ignorant as Adam, before he was told by his wife that there were such things as tubes or troches, lungs or lozenges.

      The Nineteenth Century would load with disease the air of Eden, and hunt mankind down with superimposed airs and conjectural evils. Mind is at once the best friend and the worst foe of the body, and Truth the universal healer.

      Shall a regular practitioner treat all the cases of organic disease, and the Christian Scientist try his hand only on hysteria, hypochondria, or hallucination? One disease is no more unreal than another. All disease is the result of hallucination, and can carry its ill effects no further than mortal mind maps out. Facts are stubborn things. Christian Science finds the decided type of acute disease, however severe, quite as ready to yield as the less distinct type and chronic form of disease. It handles the most malignant contagion with perfect assurance.

      Because guided by Divine Truth, and not guess-work, the Theologus (i. e. the student, or expounder, of the divine law) treats disease with more certain results than any other healer on the globe. The Scientist who understands and adheres strictly to the rules of my system, and rests his demonstration on its sure basis, is the only one safe to employ in difficult and dangerous cases.

      Mind as far outstrips drugs in the cure of disease as in the cure of sin. The more excellent way is Mind Science in every case. Medicine is not a science, but a bundle of speculative human theories. The prescription that succeeds in one instance fails in another, owing to the different mental states of the patient. These states are not comprehended; and they are without a sign, except to the skilful Scientist. The rule, and its perfectness in my system, never vary. If you fail to succeed in any case, it is because you have not demonstrated the rule and proven the Principle.

      Many of our best men and women have passed away, since this book was begun, who might have been saved by the Science of which it treats. The minor hosts of Æsculapius are flooding our land with diseases, because they are utterly ignorant of the unity of the human mind and body. They treat the sick as if there were but one factor in the case, and that one body, without mind.

      There is an old riddle in natural history — Which was first, the egg or the bird? To match the ancient question, I propose this modern one: Which was first, Mind or medicine? If Mind was first, and self-existent, then Spirit, not matter, must have been the first medicine. It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, or obtain them for human use; else Jesus also would have recommended and employed them in his healing.

      Mind being first, it made medicine; but the medicine was Mind. It could not have been that which departs from the nature of Mind. Truth is God's medicine for error of every sort. The human mind would use error as a medicine, and take the greater evil to cure the less. It would appease malice with revenge, and quiet pain with morphine. Of two evils, it chooses the greater. The Divine Mind never called matter medicine, or made it so; and matter required a material and human belief before it could be considered as medicine.

      Omnipotent Mind could not possibly create a remedy beyond itself. Erring, finite, human mind needs something besides itself. So it believes in something else, and raises matter into a god; for the human mind was an idolater from the beginning, having other gods and more than the One Mind.

      Here you see how sense makes its own idols, names them matter, worships them. With pagan pride it has attributed to a material god of medicine an ability beyond itself. The beliefs of the human mind rob and enslave it, and then impute this sad result to another personality of illusion, named Satan.

      Follow out true cultivation;

       Widen Education's plan;

       From the Majesty of Nature

       Teach the Majesty of Man!

      In these lines Charles Swain points out the true duty of man.

      A physician of the old school remarked with great gravity: “We know that mind affects the body somewhat, and advise our patients to be hopeful, cheerful, and take as little medicine as possible; but mind can never cure organic difficulties.”

      The logic is lame and facts contradict it. I have cured what is termed organic disease as readily as purely functional disease, and with no other means except Mind. Few will deny that death has been occasioned by fright. This proves that every function of the body, its entire organism, is governed by the human mind; unless this mind yields to the Divine Mind, and is saved from itself. Fear has stopped the action of the blood, heart, lungs, and brain.

      That mortal mind does govern every organ of the mortal body we have overwhelming proof. It is the autocrat of the mortal body, that yields to no power except by its own consent. It wields the sceptre of a monarch, until the immortal Divine Mind takes away its supposed realm.

      If the human mind has the power to kill, it has utter control of what is termed the human mechanism. If the human mind can make a healthy organ cease to act, the Divine Mind can more readily make the action of being harmonious and eternal. Divine Mind does all that. The only difficulty is to see and acknowledge it, yield to this power, and fall at the feet of Truth.

      Mortal mind produces what is termed organic disease as certainly as it produces hysteria, and must undo its own errors, sicknesses, and sins. I have demonstrated this beyond all cavil. The evidence of Mind's absolute control is to me as sure as the evidence of my existence.

      Mortal mind and body are one. Neither exists without the other, and both must be changed by the immortal. Mortal matter is but a false conception of this mortal mind. It builds its own superstructures, of which the body is the grosser and more basal portion — a material and sensual belief first and last.

      Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of good. It is nothing, because it is the absence of something; and it is error, because it presupposes the absence of Truth, when really Truth is omnipresent. That there is no power in evil, we all need to learn.

      Error is self-assertive, saying, “I am an Ego, overmastering good.” This falsehood exposes its falsity, and should strip it of all pretensions. The only power of evil is to destroy itself. It can never destroy an iota of good. Every attempt of evil to do that has been a failure, and only aids in the final destruction of error.

      There is no involuntary action. Mind includes all action and volition. But the human mind tries to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary action. Take away this erring mind, and the body loses all appearance of life or action, and the human mind then calls it dead.

      Still this human mind has a body, acting and appearing to itself to live, like the one that it had before death, and that we see. Mortals comprehend not even mortal existence. This proves their ignorance of the all-knowing Mind and His creation.

      If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake, the patient dies, while physician and patient are expecting favorable results. Did belief cause this death? Even so, and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken.

      In the allegory of material creation, Adam, alias the belief of Life and Intelligence in matter, had the naming of all material animals. These names indicated their properties, qualities, and forms. Error, the opposite of Truth, names the qualities and effects of what it terms matter, and so rouses the law of belief that holds the preponderance of power in human opinions against Spirit and Truth.

      The few who think a drug harmless, where a mistake has been made in the prescription, are unequal to the many who have named it poison, and so the majority opinion governs the result.

      The remote cause, or belief, is stronger than the predisposing and exciting cause, because of its priority, and the connection of past mortal thoughts with present. The adult has a deformity, produced, thirty years ago, by the terror of his mother. That chronic error is more difficult of cure than an acute injury, unless we wrest it from mortal mind, and base the cure on Science, or Immortal Mind, to whom all things are possible.

      What is