Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/364

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360
RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS

I will apply this to disease. I take upon myself your infirmities that I may lead you to health, for health to you is heaven. The love for health prompts you to come. My love for you prompts me to lead you to health. This I do by teaching you the errors of your belief and showing you where you have been deceived. The truth like love leads you to see your error, and the happiness of your recovery is heaven. People believe that religion is one thing and health another. This is a false idea, and if you look at it you will see that to be happy is the chief end of man. Happiness is what we think we have obtained. Take the religion of our day: that is a poor illustration of happiness, for the misery it occasions is twice the happiness. We are taught our belief is one thing, and our health another. But it is not so. Man's belief is his heaven or his hell. You may not be aware of the effect of your belief.

Disease is one of the evils that follow our belief. For instance, take a young lady: begin to tell her that her happiness depends upon her having religion. She has no idea of what you mean. So to convince her you give an account of what religion is and show that she must get it or be eternally lost. This makes her nervous. So you tell her to come to Christ. This to her is blind. You say Christ is standing with His arms extended to embrace her. Now to fall into the arms of a stranger is more than she can do. She weeps, not knowing what to do. This you tell her is the conversion of her soul. At last she is made to believe she is not worthy to be a Christian. Then comes the soothing words of the priest and his words soothe her aching head and she quiets down. Then you tell her this is a change of heart. Now she is in a state to get religion.

What has been brought to pass? The young lady has been deceived into a belief that has cost her all the happiness she had. It will be said her religion had nothing to do with her health, but this cannot be the case; for every person is responsible to God or Wisdom for his belief, and he must take the consequences of his belief.

Now, as I said, religion is a belief and disease or happiness is what follows. So as all men have sinned or got a belief, the sentence of death has been passed upon them, for all have come short of the truth. So this truth came into the world of opinions to open the eyes of the blind, or appeal to a higher