Article December 15, 1917 Issue

The mistakes of the human race originate, quite commonly,...

The Christian Science Monitor

The mistakes of the human race originate, quite commonly, in ignorance of Principle. Mrs. Eddy puts this altogether admirably in a well-known passage, on page 397 of Science and Health, when she writes, "By not perceiving vital metaphysical points, not seeing how mortal mind affects the body,—acting beneficially or injuriously on the health, as well as on the morals and the happiness of mortals,—we are misled in our conclusions and methods. We throw the mental influence on the wrong side, thereby actually injuring those whom we mean to bless." Now it is the very simplicity of a discovery that often indicates its greatness. A falling apple in his garden at Woolsthorpe gave the secret of gravity to Sir Isaac Newton. A kettle steaming on a fire supplied Watt with the idea of the steam engine. The reading of a verse in the Bible revealed to Mrs. Eddy the grandest scientific fact in the world, and enabled her to rediscover the secret of Christian healing.

Out of this first discovery of Mrs. Eddy's came many others, equally simple, equally practical, and equally scientific; and not the least simple, and yet profound, is that given on page 246 of Science and Health: "Never record ages. Chronological data are no part of the vast forever. Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood." So simple and so obviously scientific a piece of advice would, it might have been imagined, have been acted upon by every one who read it. But the name of the human mind is Naaman. It is ever ready to do some startling or dramatic thing in the name of Truth, but it draws the line at the simple or commonplace. "But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper." There you have the Naaman instinct in the human mind, which expects truth to be proclaimed through a megaphone, and cannot hear the still, small voice, To it, "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" And so it will dip itself in the Abana of the philosophy of the unreality of matter, and the Pharpar of the omnipotence of divine Mind, whilst it ignores contemptuously the Jordan of an omitted birthday celebration.

Now it is an axiom of Christian Science that all causation is mental, and that matter is simply a state of the human mind. Sickness then is a result of sickly-mindedness, just as health is of healthy-mindedness, at all events on a specific point. If, then, thinking perpetually of sickness, and making mental pictures of sickness, produces a sick body, and it usually does, is it not obvious that watching the passage of years and counting birthdays must produce the impressions of old age? The man who steadily adds year to year is just as steadily insisting on the reality of matter as the man who adds field to field. No man can say, I am twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, without becoming so, and these statements limit, of very necessity, his belief in eternal life in the exact ratio of his belief in them. This is the immediate and inevitable effect of the keeping of birthdays, and it explains, in one way, those words of Mrs. Eddy's, on page 247 of Science and Health: "The acute belief of physical life comes on at a remote period, and is not so disastrous as the chronic belief." It is not the sudden or acute temptation to believe a lie that produces the bad result; it is the chronic sapping of a man's belief in good, the chronic strengthening of his belief in the power of evil and the reality of matter that weakens his power of resistance until the collapse comes. Therefore, undoubtedly, was it that the apostle James wrote: "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded."

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