Editorial September 4, 1937 Issue

Disease Is Mental

George Shaw Cook

Disease is most frequently thought of as being physical—an abnormal condition of the so-called physical organism or body. Medical practice is based upon the belief that there is life and sensation in matter and that disturbed or interrupted bodily functions, pain, suffering, disease, and death, exist as actualities. And the testimony of the material senses would seem to substantiate this belief. Indeed, if one were to accept material sense testimony as reliable, one would scarcely be able to believe otherwise. However, there are many familiar proofs of the undependable nature of the material senses, and Christian Science shows these senses to be utterly unreliable.

Many of the more enlightened doctors of medicine admitedly recognize mental causes for disease, although probably few of them have discerned that disease itself is entirely a mental condition. This, of course, is due to the prevailing belief among them that matter is real and substantial, that it has life and sensation.

Mary Baker Eddy states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468): "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." And Christian Science shows that disease is not physical, but mental—an erroneous condition of belief. Disease is never, therefore, what it seems to be, nor where, to the material senses, it seems to be. All there is to disease, whether it be called acute or chronic, functional or organic, is mortal mind's belief that disease exists and is present. To material sense disease appears to be manifested on or in what mortal mind calls the body, but in reality there is no material body on or in which disease can be, for, as Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 277): "The realm of the real is Spirit. The unlikeness of Spirit is matter, and the opposite of the real is not divine,—it is a human concept. Matter is an error of statement."

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