The People's Idea of God: Its Effect On Health And Christianity

Silent prayer is a desire, fervent, importunate: here metaphysics is seen to rise above physics, and rest all faith in Spirit, and remove all evidence of any other power than Mind; whereby we learn the great fact that there is no omnipotence, unless omnipotence is the All-power. This truth of Deity, understood, destroys discord with the higher and more potent evidences in Christian Science of man's harmony and immortality. Thought is the essence of an act, and the stronger element of action; even as steam is more powerful than water, simply because it is more ethereal. Essences are refinements that lose some materiality; and as we struggle through the cold night of physics, matter will become vague, and melt into nothing under the microscope of Mind.

Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her humane foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law regulating the practice of medicine in 1880. It were well if the sister States had followed her example and sustained as nobly our constitutional Bill of Rights. Discerning the God-given rights of man, Paul said, "I was free born." Justice and truth make man free, injustice and error enslave him. Mental Science alone grasps the standard of liberty, and battles for man's whole rights, divine as well as human. It assures us, of a verity, that mortal beliefs, and not a law of nature, have made men sinning and sick, – that they alone have fettered free limbs, and marred in mind the model of man.

We possess our own body, and make it harmonious or discordant according to the images that thought reflects upon it. The emancipation of our bodies from sickness will follow the mind's freedom from sin; and, as St. Paul admonishes, we should be "waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." The rights of man were vindicated but in a single instance when African slavery was abolished on this continent, yet that hour was a prophecy of the full liberty of the sons of God as found in Christian Science. The defenders of the rights of the colored man were scarcely done with their battles before a new abolitionist struck the keynote of higher claims, in which it was found that the feeblest mind, enlightened and spiritualized, can free its body from disease as well as sin; and this victory is achieved, not with bayonet and blood, not by inhuman warfare, but in divine peace.

Above the platform of human rights let us build another staging for diviner claims, – even the supremacy of Soul over sense, wherein man cooperates with and is made subject to his Maker. The lame, the blind, the sick, the sensual, are slaves, and their fetters are gnawing away life and hope; their chains are clasped by the false teachings, false theories, false fears, that enforce new forms of oppression, and are the modern Pharaohs that hold the children of Israel still in bondage. Mortals, alias mortal minds, make the laws that govern their bodies, as directly as men pass legislative acts and enact penal codes; while the body, obedient to the legislation of mind, but ignorant of the law of belief, calls its own enactments "laws of matter." The legislators who are greatly responsible for all the woes of mankind are those leaders of public thought who are mistaken in their methods of humanity.

The learned quacks of this period "bind heavy burdens," that they themselves will not touch "with one of their fingers." Scientific guessing conspires unwittingly against the liberty and lives of men. Should we but hearken to the higher law of God, we should think for one moment of these divine statutes of God: Let them have "dominion over all the earth." "And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." The only law of sickness or death is a law of mortal belief, and infringement on the merciful and just government of God. When this great fact is understood, the spurious, imaginary laws of matter – when matter is not a lawgiver – will be disputed and trampled under the feet of Truth. Deal, then, with this fabulous law as with an inhuman State law; repeal it in mind, and acknowledge only God in all thy ways, – "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases." Few there be who know what a power mind is to heal when imbued with the spiritual truth that lifts man above the demands of matter.