If the human body could speak, it would doubtless agree with the psalmist when he says: "False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not." Mrs. Eddy states the case of the false witnesses in another way when she says in Science and Health (p. 308): "This awful demand, 'Adam, where art thou?' is met by the admission from the head, heart, stomach, blood, nerves, etc.: 'Lo, here I am, looking for happiness and life in the body, but finding only an illusion, a blending of false claims, false pleasure, pain, sin, sickness, and death.'"

The question, What controls the body? is perennially turning mortal reasoning and human philosophy awry. Among the men who are said to be professionally qualified to understand what it is that controls the human body, this question is usually answered by the words, "Brain and nerves." This answer reminds one of the ancient myth in which the god Atlas is seen supporting the earth upon his back. When, however, that simple question is asked, What supports Atlas? we have suddenly reached the end of human fiction. Just so the question, What causes brain and nerves to act (if they act at all)? has a similar effect; for we have reached our starting point, having completed the circle of human limitations.

Plainly, then, the answer to the question, What governs the body? is not to be found in the body itself. We must look outside the body if we want to learn anything of value concerning its government. A very minute description of a trolley car, for instance, would hardly be called a definition of or a treatise on power. Yet the minute description of the anatomy and physiology of the human body has been held before the public so long that mankind have actually come to believe that the body contains within itself the issues of health and disease, life and death. It is no wonder, therefore, that the body seems to be the master instead of the servant of mankind, which is about as sensible as it would be for the trolley car to claim that it is the master of the power that moves it.

Looking closely into the desires of mankind we find that nothing is held in higher esteem than the absolute mastery of the body. Mrs. Eddy, therefore, has done a great service to humanity by actually showing us how we may learn to govern the body, not through athletic exercise nor erroneous human will, but through the understanding of the truth of being. In the first place, she makes it clear to all that a mortal body expresses a mortal mind and that from this same mortal mind come the beliefs of discord and disease; indeed the whole of this mortal mind is made up of these false beliefs. "A material body," she says (Science and Health, p. 208), "only expresses a material and mortal mind. A mortal man possesses this body, and he makes it harmonious or discordant according to the images of thought impressed upon it."

Is it not plain, therefore, that if we wish to have health we must get away from the false sense that man is mortal and has, separate from God, a mind of his own which produces the false beliefs of sin, sickness, and death? In the words of Paul: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Paul, who evidently knew more about the control of the body than our best modern physicians, indicates plainly that the deliverance from the ills of the flesh comes through Christ, Truth.

Now since it is plain that a mortal mind holds the belief that man is mortal and that he lives and dies according to the testimony of the physical senses and limits himself with these senses and seems to make good his belief, then it must also be plain that immortal Mind makes and supports man, and that man is immortal. Does this not indicate the remedy for mortal mind and its belief of man as mortal? Manifestly this remedy can never be in anatomy, in physiology, or in materia medica. The remedy for the sick and sin beset beliefs of mortality is the great fact that the so-called mortal or carnal mind is a myth, that God is the only Mind, and that this infinite Mind and none other, is Life, Truth, and Love. Once we grasp firmly, through the teaching of Christian Science, the fact that mortal or carnal mind is a selfassertive delusion, and that in reality there is no mortal mind to argue sin and disease because divine Mind is the only Mind, then we have begun to break the power that claims to be the arbiter of mankind's health and morals. Also, if mortal mind, with its beliefs of man as mortal, is subject in the body to its self-constituted material laws, then, contrariwise, the great and glorious fact about immortal Mind and man who is spiritual and immortal is that he has dominion, not only over the beliefs of mortal mind and body, but over the whole earth.

The body is, of course, the expression of a state of mortal mind, as Mrs. Eddy has shown us. It is a question, then, whether we want the truth of immortal Mind or the errors of false belief to be the governing power. The true dominion is gained through the understanding which immortal Mind imparts through the study and demonstration of Christian Science. A material body, then, is found not to be the keeper of our life nor of our health,—it is utterly beyond the power of materiality to preserve life or to control it; God is the source of our life and our health, and our understanding through Christian Science learns to rest upon God instead of the body. It is not for nothing that God, Spirit, is likened in the Scriptures unto the "Rock," for this gives the sense of foundation or security. God, Spirit, is the only true foundation or resting place for our understanding. Thus God, infinite Life, is the true foundation of our health, and certainly can keep us, whereas mortal sense cannot. Paul's advice, therefore, to be "absent from the body" and "present with the Lord" is the soundest of health laws.

Immortal man, then, has his dominion through immortal Mind. This is the great fact of being, and we can realize this verity here and now through the understanding of Christian Science. Thus we discover that man never has been nor ever can be mortal; that he is always the image and likeness of God, Spirit. This discovery cannot fail to act as a corrective to our reasoning about ourselves or our neighbor, and the immortal man appears more and more to our consciousness while the errors of sense disappear. This is what Mrs. Eddy meant when she said (Science and Health, p. 427), "Immortal Mind, governing all, must be acknowledged as supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual."