Article December 27, 1924 Issue

Overcoming Rumination

W. STUART BOOTH

Much is being written and said at present by doctors of medicine on the subject of preventive medicine, which is a recently developed branch of their activities supposedly designed to prevent, or it may be to postpone, illness. Of course, any one who reckons from the standpoint of material sense regards disease and death as inevitable; therefore, physicians do not expect or promise an elimination of these troubles, but only a more or less indefinite and problematical postponement of them. However, Christian Scientists should remember that Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 369), "The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the preventive and curative) arts belong emphatically to Christian Science, as would be readily seen, if psychology, or the Science of Spirit, God, was understood."

Christian Science practice is essentially scientific in that it deals with causes and not with effects. In strict accord with the teachings of Christ Jesus, it posits and proves the mental origin of disease and discord of every nature. Did not Jesus state that men are not defiled by that which goes into the mouth (be it food, drink, or air, with or without germs), but that they are defiled by the evil, erroneous thoughts of the heart or mind? In Christian Science practice the material body, which may be considered sick, is never treated; but the human consciousness, which claims to express itself in a material body, is corrected by means of the activity and acceptance of spiritual ideas. Thus every healing wrought by Christian Science proves the mental origin and nature of disease. As this fact is recognized by Christian Science students, they see that their prophylactic or preventive work lies in the guarding of their thoughts and in the directing of them ever spiritually upward.

Many Christians have known they should avoid giving outward expression to such trouble-breeding suggestions as hatred, malice, anger, envy, and revenge, but after coming to Christian Science they early learn they must also exclude from their thinking all such obviously un-Godlike, and therefore erroneous, thoughts. Christian Science not only teaches us that we should not give thought-room to such errors, but shows us how they may be excluded. This is to be accomplished by remembering that any thought which is not from God, the one perfect Mind, is untrue, is without divine authority, and is therefore no more a part of man, God's likeness, than is any other lie. This is readily seen in connection with such errors as those just mentioned; but it may not be so easily recognized in connection with thoughts which do not seem so obviously erroneous.

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