Editorial January 1, 1966 Issue

An Important Issue

Helen Wood Bauman

Statistics on the amount of alcoholic beverages used in the world show the degree to which mortals succumb to self-deception in regard to matter. No form of matter has power in itself to intoxicate, to stimulate, to depress, or to give pleasure. The drinker must be thoroughly hypnotized by the general belief of mortals that liquor is a stimulant before it can have the slightest effect upon him. The stimulation occurs only in the mind. This has been proved when hypnotists have made men drunk on water and occasionally when individuals, by resisting any stimulation in tests regarding alcohol, have remained free from its effects.

The present-day tendency is to make alcoholism a physical rather than a moral problem; to consider it a disease. The Christian Scientist knows it is even more than a physical or a moral issue; it is a scientific one, an issue that can be dealt with effectively only by means of spiritually scientific power. He knows that the worldwide belief in the intoxicating effect of liquor is a solid conviction, and he knows that a solid conviction of something that is untrue is an aspect of human will. Not drugs, not moralizing, but the spiritual demonstration of the truth that the divine will is the only will and the only stimulating power can overcome the false, hypnotic suggestion that alcohol has power over the mind and that the repentant drinker is helpless before it.

A person who submits to the influence of the general belief of the effect of alcohol is just as much hypnotized as the person who has consciously put himself in the hands of a professional hypnotist for any reason. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy explains the Christianly scientific method which corrects such situations. She says (pp. 185, 186), "A patient under the influence of mortal mind is healed only by removing the influence on him of this mind, by emptying his thought of the false stimulus and reaction of will-power and filling it with the divine energies of Truth."

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