facts of Science and their Principle.
The authentic history of Caspar Hauser is a useful hint as to the fraility and inadequacy of mortal mind. It proves, beyond a doubt, that education constitutes this so-called mind; and that, in turn, mortal mind avenges itself on the body, by the false sense it imparts. Incarcerated in a dungeon, where neither sight nor sound could reach him, at the age of seventeen Caspar was still a mental infant, crying and chatteriug with no more intelligence than a babe, and realizing Tennyson's description: —
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.
His case proves material sense to be but a belief, formed by education alone. The light that affords us joy gave him a belief of intense pain. Fear suffused his eyes. They were inflamed by the light, since, to his belief, it gave suffering instead of joy. After the babbling boy was taught to speak a few words, he asked to be taken back to his dungeon, and said that he should never be happy anywhere else. Outside of dismal darkness and cold silence he found no peace. Every sound convulsed him with anguish. All that he ate, except his black crust, produced violent retchings. All that gives pleasure to our educated senses gave him pain in those very senses, trained in an opposite direction.
All this is evidence of the correctness of Christian Science. Alexander Pope was right in his account of Man: —
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, —
A being darkly wise and rudely great,
With too much knowledge for the sceptic's side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, —
He hangs between: in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err,
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, —
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
The less there is said of physical structure or law, and the more there is said about moral and spiritual law, the higher the standard of mortals will be, and the further removed from imbecility of mind and body.
We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate assisted to make them healthy; but that is a mistake. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head, and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics. The effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until individual opinions improve, and mortal belief loses some portion of its error.
We must release pharmaceutics, and take up ontology. We must look into the Science, instead of accepting the sense of things. We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers, concerning the knowledge that to-day walks to and fro in the earth, that made them more hardy than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians.
Learning is useful if it is of the right sort. History, observation, invention, philosophic research, and original thought are requisite for the expansion of mortal mind, are essential to its growth out of itself, error.
The tangled barbarisms of learning we deplore, — the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments. Our arrangements for thinking and writing are lowering the standards to accommodate the purse, and meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of instruction.
The core of mortal mind is not readjusted, and its coverings are thickly inlaid with foreign devices. If modern knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force, whose materiality loses in power what it gains in time.
Eclectic religion and metaphysical healing would ameliorate sin, sickness, and death. Let our pulpits do justice to Christian Science. Let it have fair representation from the press. Give it the place in our institutions of learning now occupied by physiology, and Christian Science will eradicate sickness and sin in less time than they have taken to increase, under the old systems and stereotyped plans for subduing them. Incorrect teaching lowers the standard of Truth. Man hath sought out many inventions, but he has not yet found that knowledge can save him from the dire effects of knowledge.
Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post-mortem examination, — not from poison, or material virus, but from the fear of the disease, and from the image brought before the mind during an excited state of feeling, which is afterward outlined on the body.
Books that would rule disease out of mortal mind, and would so efface the images and thoughts of disease, instead of impressing them with force of description and medical detail, — such books would abate sickness and ultimately destroy it.
Physics would have you believe matter is diseased, independently of mortal mind, and despite its protest or co-operation. This view is as evidently erroneous to me now, and will be to others at some future day, as the rejected doctrine of the predestination of the saved and the lost. The shocking doctrine that man is governed physically all his days, and afterwards killed by the body, is too absurd to last another century.
The press unwittingly sends forth many a plague-spot into the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases, and printing long descriptions that mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it. A minutely described disease has cost many a man all his earthly days of comfort. What a price for human knowledge! But the price does not exceed the original cost. God said, “In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt die.” The doctor's mind reaches his patient's. His belief in disease — its reality and fatality to him — harms his patients more than his calomel and morphine; inasmuch as the higher stratum of mortal mind is more potent to injure than its lower substratum, called matter. A patient hears the doctor's verdict as a martyr hears his death-sentence. He may seem calm under it, but he is not. His fortitude may sustain him, but his fear has already developed the disease which is gaining the mastery.
The power of mortal mind over its own body is little known. Its destructive action, if reversed, would restore health.
Take away the penalty that must follow sin, and mortal mind could not destroy its own body. Sin alone brings death, for it is the only element of destruction. “Fear him who is able to destroy both Soul and body in hell,” said Jesus; and a careful study of this text shows that these words were a warning to beware, not of Rome, nor of Satan, nor of God, but of sin. Sickness, sin, and death are not concomitants of Life. No law supports them. They have no relation to God that can establish their power.
The doctor is the artist who outlines disease, and fills his delineations with sketches from class-books. After disease is formed in mortal mind, it is sure to appear on the body, sooner or later. The thought of disease is sometimes
