The Untroubled MindHall, Herbert J. (Herbert James)
Philosophy
The Untroubled Mind
Hall, Herbert J. (Herbert James)
Mental health
The cure and prevention of disease through the agency of man are
evidently part of the divine plan. Our eagerness to advance along the
lines of investigation and practice is but that divine plan in action.
The truly scientific spirit will neglect no possible curative agent.
When scientific men ridicule prayer, they are thinking not of the real
thing which is above all possible criticism, but of the feeble and often
pathetic groping for the real thing. We ask in our prayers for
impossible blessings that would invert the laws of God and change the
face of nature--very well, we must be prepared for disappointment. The
attitude of prayer may, indeed, transform our own lives and make
possible for us experiences that would otherwise have been impossible.
But our pathetic demands--we shall never know how forlorn and weak they
are. Prayer is the opening of the heart to the being we call God--it is
most natural and reasonable. If we pray in our weakness and blindness
for what we may not have, there is, nevertheless, a wonderful
re-creative effect within us. The comfort and peace of such communion is
beyond all else healing and restoring in its influence upon the troubled
and anxious mind of man. The poet or the scientist who bows in adoration
before the glory of God revealed in nature, prays in effect to that God
and his soul is refreshed and renewed. The poor wretch who stands
blindfolded before the firing squad, waiting the word that ends the life
of a military spy, is near enough to God--and the whispered prayer upon
his lips is cure for the wounds that take his life.
The best kind of prayer seeks not and asks not for physical relief or
benefit, but opens the heart to its maker, and so receives the cure of
peace that is a greater miracle than any yet wrought by man. Under the
influence of that cure the sick are well and the dead are alive again.
With the courage and spirit of such a cure in our lives, we shall
inevitably do our utmost to relieve, by any good means, the physical
suffering of the world. We shall follow the laws of nature. We shall
study them with the utmost care. We shall take nothing for granted,
since by less careful steps we shall miss the divine law and so go
astray. The science of healing will become no chance and irrational
thing. We shall use all the natural means to relieve and prevent
suffering--there will be no scoring of one set of doctors by another
because all will have one purpose. But more to the point than that, men
will discover that health in its largest sense consists in living devout
and prayerful lives whereunto shall be revealed in good time all that
our finite minds can know and use. There will be no suffering of the
body in the old and pitiful sense, for we shall be so much alive that
disease and death can no longer claim us.
THE END
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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