Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/236

his position and power in Mind, from day to day, with, the same certainty and precision that the mariner knows the position of his ship on the ocean.

"Science and Health" describes the operation of Christian healing in these words:

The body improves under the same truth that improves the mind. Christian Science is sunlight to the body. It invigorates and purifies. It acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with Truth. It changes the secretions, expels humors, dissolves tumors, relaxes rigid muscles, and restores carious bones to soundness. The effects of this Science are to stir the human mind to a change of base whereby it may yield to the Divine Mind. As when an acid and an alkali meet and ferment, bringing out a third property, so mental and moral fermentation change the material base of man, giving more spirituality to mortal sense, and causing it to depend less on material evidence. The changes that go on in mortal mind serve to reconstruct the body.

Hence the doctrine "Truth is the universal medicine of sin and sickness"; both have their origin in error, in ignorance; the antidote to error is Truth, to ignorance is understanding; and the question of reality or unreality is summed up in the words "Sin and sickness have just as much reality as you give them—and no more."

The nature and scope of healing in Christian Science are further set forth in these words:

No man is healed in sin, or by it, any more than he is morally saved in or by sin. To be every whit whole, he must be better spiritually as well as physically. Lust, hatred, and dishonesty make a man sick; and neither medicine nor mind can physically help him unless they make him better morally, and so deliver him from the destroyer. Body and mind are one. The heat of hatred, inflaming brutal propensities, the indulgence of evil motives and aims, will make any man (who is above the very lowest type of manhood) a hopeless sufferer. They consume the body with the fires of hell!

It will be seen that Christian Science is the Science of Life; its text-book says: "Its anatomy is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the art of dissecting thoughts, in order to discover their quality, quantity, and origin; it teaches when and how to probe the self-inflicted wounds of malice, envy, and hate; how to secure the hallowed influences of unselfishness, philanthropy, spiritual love, and the government of the body, both in health and sickness; its ontology is the nature and essence of all being—Mind, and its essential qualities; and on these primary elements my system of mental healing is based; its pharmacy is moral, and its medicine is intellectual and spiritual for physical healing."

The proposition "all is Mind, there is no matter," is fundamental in Christian Science, but, as above intimated, it is not, as superficial critics allege, a bald denial of the phenomena of material sense. In its methods the truth of this proposition is