Article February 21, 1914 Issue

Disease not Inherited

MILTON B. MARKS

Christian Science is freeing mankind from the belief that disease is lawfully inherited, and is unfolding the real and available inheritance of man in God's image and likeness. That which is not the truth of man is found to be but a supposititious inheritance, the spurious nature and unreality of which are gradually exposed as Christian Science is demonstrated. We need not be in bondage to the belief that disease is ineradicable because inherited, since disease is never the truth of man.

Mrs. Eddy says of this belief, "Disease is always induced by a false sense mentally entertained, not destroyed" (Science and Health, p. 411). In proportion as this fact is understood, the belief in inherited disease resolves itself into the proposition that false beliefs and sin—satisfaction in which is always illusion—do not belong to our inheritance. Whether such illusions account for themselves on the ground of being inherited or acquired, it is evident that the effective remedy for them is the truth which God unfolds to man and which dispels these errors, relieving mankind from all fear, and also from all sinful desires.

It is not, then, so much a question of what one has inherited of an evil nature, as of how much of it one is accepting as real or God-given. If mortal man, by reason of the doctrine of inheritance, manifests sinful tendencies, appetites, and passions, vain intellectual conceits, undemonstrable doctrines, physiological and medical theories and fears which tend to obscure the truth of God and man set forth in the first chapter of Genesis, or if these errors have been impressed upon him through association, or through instruction, education, and training based upon a misconception of what true knowledge is, the fact remains that all this is but "the old man with his deeds" to be "put off," while "the new man" is to be "put on" through right knowledge of God and its daily application. The individual is a free moral agent, and freedom from so-called inherited sinful tendencies and disease is wholly a question of right mental activity now.

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