THE CURE OF DISEASES
MORTAL ills and the needs of the stomach rank next after the instinct of
self-preservation among all the subjects which engage the attention of the race.
If we do not go on living we cannot do the work we think there is to do; if we
remain hungry we will lose the power to work properly or to enjoy, and at last
come to the door of death. From bad or scanty food follows a train of physical
ills called generally disease. Disease reaches us also through too much food.
So in every direction these ills attack us; even when our feeding is correct
and sufficient it is found that we fall a prey because our Karma, settled by
ourselves is some previous life, ordains that we enter on this one handicapped
by the hereditary taint due to the wickedness or or the errors of our fathers
and mothers. And the records of science show that the taint in the blood or the
lymph may jump over many lives, attacking with virulence some generation
distant very far from the source. What wonder, then that the cure of disease is
an all-absorbing subject with every one! The Christian knows that it is decreed
by Almighty God that He will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children
even to the third and fourth generation, and the non-believer sees that by some
power in nature the penalty is felt even so far.
All of this has given to the schools of mental and so-called "metaphysical"
healing a strong pull on the fears, the feelings, the wishes, and the bodies of
those to whom they address themselves, and especially in the United States.
That there is more attention given to the subject in America seems true to those
who have been on the other side of the Atlantic and noticed how small is the
proportion of people there who know anything about the subject. But in the
United States in every town many can be found who know about these schools and
practice after their methods. Why it has more hold here can be left to
conjecture, as the point under consideration is why it has any hold at all. It
is something like patent medicine. Offer a cure to people for their many ills,
and they will take it up; offer it cheap, and they will use it; offer it as an
easy method, and they will rush for it under certain conditions. Metaphysical
healing is easy for some because it declares, first, that no money need be paid
to doctors for medicine; second, that medical fluids and drugs may be dispensed
with; and third that it is easily learned and practiced. The difficulties that
arise out of the necessities of logic are not present for those who never
studied it, but are somewhat potent with those who reason correctly; - but that
is not usual for the general run of minds. They see certain effects and accept
the assumed cause as the right one. But many persons will not even investigate
the system, because they think it requires them to postulate the non-existence
of that which they see before their eyes. The statements quoted from the monthly
Christian Science in March PATH are bars in the way of such minds. If
they could be induced to just try the method offered for cure, belief might
result, for effects indeed often follow. But the popular mind is not in favor
of "mind cure," and more prominence is given in the daily papers to cases of
death under it than to cures. And very full reports always appear of a case such
as one in March, where "faith curers," in order to restore life, went to
praying over the dead body of one of the members of a believing family.
During a recent tour over this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
back, I had the opportunity of meeting hundreds of disciples of these schools,
and found in nearly all cases that they were not addicted to logic but calmly
ignored very plain propositions, satisfied that if cures were accomplished the
cause claimed must be the right one, and almost without exception they denied
the existence of evil or pain or suffering. There was a concurrence of
testimony from all to show that the dominant idea in their minds was the cure of
their bodily ills and the continuance of health. The accent was not on the
beauty of holiness or the value to them and the community of a right moral
system and right life, but on the cure of their diseases. So the conclusion has
been forced home that all these schools exist because people desire to be well
more than they desire to be good, although they do not object to goodness if
that shall bring wholeness.
And, indeed, one does not have to be good to gain the benefit of the
teachings. It is enough to have confidence, to assert boldly that this does not
exist and that that has no power to hurt one. I do not say the teachers of the
"science" agree with me herein, but only that whether you are good or bad the
results will follow the firm practice of the method enjoined, irrespective of
the ideas of the teachers.
For in pure mind-cure as compared with its congener "Christian Science," you
do not have to believe in Jesus and the gospels, yet the same results are
claimed, for Jesus taught that whatever you prayed for with faith, that you
should have.
Scientific research discloses that the bodies of our race are infected with
taints that cause nearly all of our diseases, and school after school of
medicine has tried and still tries to find the remedy that will dislodge the
foulness in the blood. This is scientific, since it seeks the real physical
cause; metaphysical healing says it cures, but cannot prove that the cause is
destroyed and not merely palliated. That there is some room for doubt history
shows us, for none will deny that many pure thinking and acting pair have
brought forth children who displayed some taint derived from a distant
ancestor. Evidently their pure individual thoughts had no power over the great
universal development of the matter used by those human bodies.
Turning now to medicine we find the Italian Count Mattei promulgating a
system of cure by the homeopathic use of subtle vegetable essences which may
well give pause to those who would make universal the curing by faith or mind
alone. Some of his liquids will instantly stop a violent pain, restore sight,
give back hearing, and dissipate abnormal growths. His globules will make a
drunken man sober, and, given to the nurse who suckles a babe, will cure the
child who takes the milk. The drunkard and the child do not think about or have
faith in the remedies, yet they cure. Is it not better to restore health by
physical means and leave the high teachings of the healers, all taken from well
know sources, for the benefit of our moral nature?
And if Christian healers read these lines, should they not remember that
when the prophet restored the widow's son he used physical means - his own
magnetism applied simultaneously to every member of the child's body, and
Jesus, when the woman who touched his garment was cured, lost a portion of his
vitality - not his thoughts - for he said "virtue" had gone out from him? The
Apostle also gave directions that if any were sick the others should assemble
about the bed and anoint with oil, laying on their hands meanwhile: simply
physical therapeutics following a long line of ancient precedent dating back to
Noah. Moses taught how to cure diseases and to disinfect places where where
contagion lurked. It was not by using the high power of thought, but by
processes deemed by him to be effectual, such as sprinkling blood of animals
slaughtered in peculiar circumstances. Without declaring for or against his
methods, it is very certain that he supposed by these means subtle forces of a
physical nature would be liberated and brought to bear on the case in hand.
The mass of testimony through the ages is against healing physical ills by
the use of the higher forces in nature, and the reason, once well known but
later on forgotten, is the one given in the article of January, 1892, - that
diseases are gross manifestations showing themselves on their way out of the
nature so that one may be purified. To arrest them though thought ignorantly
directed is to throw them back into their cause and replant them in their
mental plane.
This is the true ground of our objection to metaphysical healing practices,
which we distinguish from the assumptions and so-called philosophy on which
those methods are claimed to stand. For we distinctly urge that the effects are
not brought by any philosophical system whatever, but by the practical though
ignorant use of psycho-physiological processes.
William Q. Judge
Path, September, 1892
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