It will be observed that in the process of applying the principles of auto-suggestion to the cure of disease the patient is not called upon to tax his own credulity by any assertion that is not a demonstrable scientific truth. He is not called upon to deny the existence of matter, nor does he find it necessary to deny the reality of the disease which affects him. In short, he is not called upon to deny the evidence of his senses, to assert a manifest impossibility, nor to maintain an exasperating absurdity as a condition precedent to his recovery. The fact that cures can be made and are constantly being made by those who instruct their patients that a denial of the existence of matter and of the reality of disease is a necessary condition to their recovery, is the strongest possible evidence of the truth of the proposition that the subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by the power of suggestion. For it is a fundamental truth in psycho-therapeutics that no cure ever was, or ever can be, effected by mental processes until the subjective mind of the patient is impressed with a belief in the efficacy of the means employed. It is obvious, however, that it is more difficult to impress a manifest absurdity upon the subjective mind of a man of common-sense than it is to impress him with a belief in a demonstrable scientific truth. Hence it is that, by methods now in vogue, both healer and patient are handicapped just in proportion to the tax laid upon their credulity. The point is, that in impressing a patient with a new scientific truth we should seek to make it as simple as possible, and avoid anything which will shock his common-sense. Christ enjoined upon his followers the simple scientific fact that faith on their part was a condition precedent to their reception of the benefits of his healing power; and he compelled them to believe, by publicly demonstrating that power. He would have had little success among the people with whom he had to deal if he had begun his treatment by telling them that they had no disease; that leprosy is a figment of the imagination, and has no existence except in the mind; or that blindness is merely blindness of the mind, and not of the body; and that the body itself has no existence except as a form of belief. He even resorted to material remedies, as in the case of the blind man, when "He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing."[34]