The People's Idea of God: Its Effect On Health And ChristianityEddy, Mary Baker
Religion
The People's Idea of God: Its Effect On Health And Christianity
Eddy, Mary Baker
Christian Science
and man are far from correct.
The glorious Godhead is Life, Truth, and Love, and these three terms
for one divine Principle are the three in one that can be understood,
and that find no reflection in sinning, sick, and dying mortals. No
miracle of grace can make a spiritual mind out of beliefs that are as
material as the heathen deities. The pagan priests appointed Apollo
and Esculapius the gods of medicine, and they inquired of these
heathen deities what drugs to prescribe. Systems of religion and of
medicine grown out of such false ideals of the Supreme Being cannot
heal the sick and cast out devils, error. Eschewing a materialistic
and idolatrous theory and practice of medicine and religion, the
apostle devoutly recommends the more spiritual Christianity,--"one
Lord, one faith, one baptism." The prophets and apostles, whose lives
are the embodiment of a living faith, have not taken away our Lord,
that we know not where they have laid him; they have resurrected a
deathless life of love; and into the cold materialisms of dogma and
doctrine we look in vain for their more spiritual ideal, the risen
Christ, whose _materia medica_ and theology were one.
The ideals of primitive Christianity are nigh, even at our door. Truth
is not lost in the mists of remoteness or the barbarisms of spiritless
codes. The right ideal is not buried, but has risen higher to our
mortal sense, and having overcome death and the grave, wrapped in a
pure winding-sheet, it sitteth beside the sepulchre in angel form,
saying unto us, "Life is God; and our ideal of God has risen above the
sod to declare His omnipotence." This white-robed thought points away
from matter and doctrine, or dogma, to the diviner sense of Life and
Love,--yea, to the Principle that is God, and to the demonstration
thereof in healing the sick. Let us then heed this heavenly visitant,
and not entertain the angel unawares.
The ego is not self-existent matter animated by mind, but in itself is
mind; therefore a Truth-filled mind makes a pure Christianity and a
healthy mind and body. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in a lecture before
the Harvard Medical School: "I firmly believe that if the whole
_materia medica_ could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be
all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." Dr.
Benjamin Waterhouse writes: "I am sick of learned quackery." Dr.
Abercrombie, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh,
writes: "Medicine is the science of guessing." Dr. James Johnson,
Surgeon Extraordinary to the King, says: "I declare my conscientious
belief, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there was
not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist,
druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less
sickness and less mortality than now obtains." Voltaire says: "The art
of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the
disease."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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