Editorial February 18, 1939 Issue

Cause and Cure of Disease

George Shaw Cook

A psychiatrist connected with a well-known medical school was recently quoted by a New York newspaper as having pointed to hate and fear as contributory causes of a certain type of respiratory disease frequently regarded by doctors of medicine as difficult to cure. On pages 404 and 405 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which was first published in 1875, its author, Mary Baker Eddy, says: "Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers. The basic error is mortal mind."

For more than sixty years students of Christian Science, working from the standpoint that disease has a mental cause, have dealt with mental conditions and not with matter, in the treatment of sickness. While it is often the case that so-called functional and organic diseases have their origin in asserted laws of mortal mind, such as those pertaining to heredity, climate, food, hygiene, and so forth, sickness is more often attributable to such mental states as those mentioned above, especially to fear.

So convinced was Mrs. Eddy that fear is the chief cause of disease that she gives Christian Scientists the following advice on pages 411 and 412 of Science and Health: "Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients. Silently reassure them as to their exemption from disease and danger. Watch the result of this simple rule of Christian Science, and you will find that it alleviates the symptoms of every disease. If you succeed in wholly removing the fear, your patient is healed." Christian Science enables one to see and to prove that fear, whether it to be of persons, things, circumstances, or conditions, is in reality baseless. When viewed from the standpoint of the infinite all-inclusiveness of divine Love, fear is seen to be without actuality. As the Apostle John said, "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear." Since fear has no abiding place in infinite Love, it has no existence at all, for it is obvious that there can be nothing outside of infinity.

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