Article January 4, 1913 Issue

OVERCOMING OF TEMPERAMENT

CATHARINE SEVERENS.

In bygone days there was a generally accepted theory that a man's character was decided by the preponderance of certain elements in the body, certain "humors" which, proportionately combined, produced given mental characteristics or temperament; for example, the phlegmatic, the nervous, and the artistic temperaments. It is now admitted that the world has long since outgrown this specific theory, but it has not yet risen above the belief that body controls and conditions thought and character, and so we constantly hear of this or that person as possessing a certain temperament, with the inference that he is a slave to that temperament and that it governs him equally with the so-called law of heredity or environment.

Christian Science frees men from every form of bondage through the understanding that God's law is the only law; that Spirit, not matter, conditions man; that the body is but the manifestation or externalization of thought, and that Mind alone is causative, thereby completely reversing the opposite belief that mental conditions or characteristics can be in any way dependent upon the physical structure or economy. The truth of this teaching is proven every time that disease is cast out through mental treatment alone, and it is only upon this basis that real healing can ever be accomplished.

The student of Christian Science learns that he must begin with mortal thought as the seat of all disturbance, and to him temperament is but the individual measure of material thinking, whatever may be claimed or accepted of mortal belief, and nothing more. He learns that the belief of temperament, entertained and indulged, leads to discord of many kinds,—bodily disease, domestic inharmony, business failure, the loss of friendships, the distrust and dislike of one's fellow men; and he is impelled to turn to his model, the "Mind of Christ" (Science and Health, Pref., p. ix), in a prayerful effort to eliminate that which will not bear comparison in his own mentality.

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