Article March 2, 1918 Issue

Whether the word heart, in its symbolic Scriptural meaning...

The Christian Science Monitor

Whether the word heart, in its symbolic Scriptural meaning and its modern common and literary usage, is understood to refer to the affections and emotions or to the intellect and will, it is certain that, in any case, it indicates conditions and states of the human mind. When the writer of Proverbs declared of mortal man, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he," and "A sound heart is the life of the flesh," he made perfectly clear statements that the conditions and beliefs of the human mind determine for a man his character and his health.

All have seen clearly enough that the quality of a man's heart, that is, his mind, constitutes his character, but men had not perceived, until the advent of Christian Science, that the state of a man's heart, or his thinking, is directly causative of all the fluctuating conditions of the mortal body, although this fact was made sufficiently clear nineteen centuries ago in the words of Jesus the Christ, "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man."

Since the mortal mind is an unreal counterfeit of divine Mind, the origin and Life of man, it is evident that this mind has no power within itself to produce the beatific purity of heart which shall see God, and which, as a consequence, shall see man, God's likeness, in his perfection. The "sound heart," the "merry heart," the "honest and good heart," of Scriptural phrase, which insure health, cheerfulness, and a fruitful life, begin to appear only as material-mindedness itself begins to be superseded by divine intelligence. Since the material body is nothing but a picture of the mortal mind which possesses it, the body must necessarily express whatever beliefs this material mind holds within itself. This is why Christian Science lays entire stress upon the correction of the beliefs of the mortal mind in the scientific healing of disease, and pays no attention to the body. Effects change exactly as the causes of those effects change; and when a cause is removed, the effect can no longer appear.

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