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
Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her humane
foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law regulating the practice of
medicine in 1880. It were well if the sister States had followed her
example and sustained as nobly our constitutional Bill of Rights.
Discerning the God-given rights of man, Paul said, "I was free born."
Justice and truth make man free, injustice and error enslave him.
Mental Science alone grasps the standard of liberty, and battles for
man's whole rights, divine as well as human. It assures us, of a
verity, that mortal beliefs, and not a law of nature, have made men
sinning and sick,--that they alone have fettered free limbs, and
marred in mind the model of man.
We possess our own body, and make it harmonious or discordant
according to the images that thought reflects upon it. The
emancipation of our bodies from sickness will follow the mind's
freedom from sin; and, as St. Paul admonishes, we should be "waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." The rights of
man were vindicated but in a single instance when African slavery was
abolished on this continent, yet that hour was a prophecy of the full
liberty of the sons of God as found in Christian Science. The
defenders of the rights of the colored man were scarcely done with
their battles before a new abolitionist struck the keynote of higher
claims, in which it was found that the feeblest mind, enlightened and
spiritualized, can free its body from disease as well as sin; and this
victory is achieved, not with bayonet and blood, not by inhuman
warfare, but in divine peace.
Above the platform of human rights let us build another staging for
diviner claims,--even the supremacy of Soul over sense, wherein man
cooperates with and is made subject to his Maker. The lame, the blind,
the sick, the sensual, are slaves, and their fetters are gnawing away
life and hope; their chains are clasped by the false teachings, false
theories, false fears, that enforce new forms of oppression, and are
the modern Pharaohs that hold the children of Israel still in bondage.
Mortals, _alias_ mortal minds, make the laws that govern their bodies,
as directly as men pass legislative acts and enact penal codes; while
the body, obedient to the legislation of mind, but ignorant of the law
of belief, calls its own enactments "laws of matter." The legislators
who are greatly responsible for all the woes of mankind are those
leaders of public thought who are mistaken in their methods of
humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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