Page:Science and Health.djvu/418

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414
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

fire, for speaking it this time. We have faith this book will do its work, though not fully understood, in the nineteenth century. The revelator read its history in the little book, “Sweet in the mouth, and bitter in the belly.” Though but a hint in time, it is a tale for eternity. Materiality must and will go out, though it be slowly; the spiritual era advances when physical effects will no longer be attributed to physical causes, but discerned in their final spiritual cause.

When fear causes the blood to bound through veins and arteries, or languidly to move the palsied mechanism, destroy the fear, and the system regains its equilibrium; anodynes, counter-irritants, or depletion can never reduce inflammation like the Truth of being. Faith, or belief, is a poor equivalent for science; we must understand man metaphysically, before we can control him aright, physically. Ignorance, coupled with a smattering of metaphysical learning, is a shocking bore; the Truth of being reduced to a petty cross-fire on every poor cripple and invalid, sending into him the cold bullet, “nothing ails you,” had better be unsaid until it be understood. If a boil appears suddenly, that you say is painful, does it ache? The boil does not ache, for matter has no sensation; it is mind that feels, and that boil bespeaks your belief of heat, pain, swelling, and inflammation, but you call it the boil. Heat is a product of fear; warmth is the normal condition of Truth, cold or heat is not; body bereft of mind is cold at first, and afterwards nothing. Fearproduces the heat, and another phase of belief tries to expel it through yet another form of belief, called a boil, that now appears on the body, mind holding at