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 Mental Healing. 
 
 ■ 
 
 I 
 
 
 
in 
 
 ESSENTIALS 
 
 Mental Healing 
 
 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE 
 
 By L. M. MARSTON, M. D. 
 n 
 
 SECOND EDITION REVISED. 
 
 BOSTON 
 PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 
 
 lE 3Y 
 olishing Co. 
 
 Bldg. CmCAtO. 
 
 Cm 
 
 

 Copyrighted 1886. 
 
 BY 
 I* 1VL MARSTON. 
 
 3y Transfer 
 
 D. C. Public Library 
 
 JUL 13 1932 
 
PREFACE 
 
 He who publishes a book to inform the 
 reader, rather than to flatter a personal 
 conceit, justifies the act as a response to 
 an existing demand. It is to such a feel- 
 ing that this little manual owes its origin. 
 The interest in the phenomena of mental 
 healing is rapidly increasing in all parts 
 of the country, and thousands of intelli- 
 gent, thoughtful people, with no special 
 leaning toward what they account a 
 doubtful science, are asking for a com- 
 prehensive, explicit statement, in plain 
 language, of the theory and practice of 
 this way of treating disease ; teachers and 
 students also are in need of a suitable 
 and convenient text-book. It is to such 
 seekers after light and help that this work 
 is addressed. 
 
MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 But after much and varied experience 
 in the teaching and practice of mental 
 healing, the author is convinced that 
 much has been claimed as part and parcel 
 of the subject which does not strictly belong 
 to it, while the essentials need to be pre- 
 sented more clearly and logically. 
 
 This volume, as far as the author under- 
 stands them, embodies the truths common 
 to all forms of mind healing, and excludes 
 whatever is dogmatical or tends to dis- 
 criminate in favor of any particular school 
 or way of practice. It recognizes and 
 explains the principles of " Christian 
 Science," " prayer-and-f aith cure," and 
 other methods of metaphysical and psychi- 
 cal treatment of disease, which have a 
 common basis in truth. 
 
 All agree to say that the healing power 
 is of God, that the real man is the spiritual 
 and not the physical being, and that right 
 thinking produces right action. These 
 subjects are considered in the following 
 pages, in their proper order. What is 
 taught about Supreme Intelligence as the 
 source of life, knowledge and power, is the 
 leading topic, because all true ideas take 
 
TO BE READ IN COURSE. J 
 
 their departure from God as the center. 
 Man is the next subject treated, because 
 it is necessary to know what he is and 
 what relations he sustains to God, in 
 order to understand him. Since the 
 human body, which is the object of heal- 
 ing, is material, and disease is a phenom- 
 enon of organized matter, the true theory 
 of matter is also explained and applied. 
 
 The chapter on the mental treatment of 
 disease is based on what has been pre- 
 viously explained in the book, and cannot 
 be fully understood until the contents of 
 the previous pages are mastered. The 
 reader is, therefore, recommended to begin 
 with this preface, and read each division 
 of the book in order, omitting nothing, 
 until the last; he will then have given the 
 subject a candid hearing, in the particular 
 way in which mental healers prefer to 
 have it presented, and may then be fairly 
 entitled to accept or reject the claims 
 advocated herein. 
 
 In preparing the work the aim has been 
 to so arrange the subject matter, that the 
 book would be adapted to the wants of 
 the general reader, and at the same time 
 
5 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 suitable as a text-book for the use of 
 teachers and students in the class-room. 
 
 While writing out the theories and 
 statements that long experience and care- 
 ful study show to be the essential ground- 
 work of the art of healing without medi- 
 cine, the author has been stimulated by 
 the hope (which he believes well founded), 
 that the product of his labor will be the 
 means of great good to his fellow-men, by 
 leading them to withdraw attention from 
 the illusions of material sense, and grasp 
 with firmer faith and clearer vision eternal 
 realities and spiritual truth. 
 
 The author is a firm believer in immor- 
 tality, — a conscious existence after the 
 change called death. The fact that we 
 have a conscious identity now, is proof 
 that we shall always remain the conscious 
 individual expression of the one Spirit, 
 God. 
 
 L. M. M. 
 
 130 Chandler St., Boston. 
 December, 1886. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page. 
 
 Introduction n 
 
 I. God 19 
 
 II. Man 33 
 
 III. Matter 48 
 
 IV. Disease 63 
 
 V. Sin and Death j6 
 
 VI. Healing 86 
 
 VII. Treatment 98 
 
 VIII. Universal Truth 116 
 
 9 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Man's inmost consciousness is the 
 touchstone of recondite as well as obvious 
 truth. Get but that sure test, and it may- 
 be trusted to the last ; for " the soul's em- 
 phasis is always right." The contents of 
 this little book, although not opposed to 
 sound reason, appeals mainly to this cer- 
 tain test, and relies on intuitive perception, 
 rather than logic, in support of the posi- 
 tions assumed. 
 
 But it frequently happens that the 
 easiest approach to the star-chamber of 
 conviction lies along the line of expe- 
 rience and memory. Especially is this 
 the case with the subject herein consid- 
 ered, and any reader, who stops to pon- 
 der the evidence, will find facts enough 
 about which he knows, to disarm preju- 
 
12 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 dice and bespeak for these pages a candid 
 perusal. 
 
 All who have seen much of the work-, 
 ings of disease are ready to acknowledge 
 the truth of Dr. O. W. Holmes's assertion 
 that " the great proportion of cases of 
 sickness tend to get well, sooner or later, 
 with good nursing and little or no medi- 
 cine." Mother Nature is forever mend- 
 ing. There is a power enlisted on the 
 side of recovery and health that, under 
 various names, as " vitality," " anima," 
 "nervous influence," "sensorial energy," 
 "vital principle," "occult cause," "stim- 
 uli," " vis medicatrix nature?" makes for a 
 cure, whether the circumstances be favor- 
 able or adverse. 
 
 The helpful influence of this persistent 
 life force comes to the invalid, sometimes 
 as a mere impression that his time to die 
 is not at hand, or that his life-work is un- 
 finished and he cannot be spared, or that 
 he chooses to get well and will not yield 
 the struggle; but oftener it is simply a 
 tenacity of life, a vitality that conquers 
 every morbid tendency, and finally lifts the 
 patient to his feet. 
 
WARDING OFF DISEASE. 1 3 
 
 Another fact of common observation is 
 that the mind exerts a powerful influence 
 on the state of health. Cheerfulness, 
 hopefulness, and fortitude are the allies of 
 recovery ; dejection, sorrow, and fright are 
 in league with death. As much skepti- 
 cism about the presence of disease as is 
 consistent with prudence tends to ward it 
 off. 
 
 " The best receipt for health, say what 
 they will, 
 Is never to suppose we shall be ill." 
 
 A positive, dogged refusal to believe 
 himself sick has saved many a man from a 
 dangerous illness. The advantage of 
 withdrawing attention from symptoms that 
 are alarming, and fixing the thought on 
 something else is well understood. In 
 this way the parent soothes the crying 
 infant, and by the same means Mother 
 Nature makes her larger child forget his 
 languor and pain, while she pours upon 
 his wounds the balm of her own prophy- 
 lactic. 
 
 All know how fruitful of disorder are 
 anxiety, worry, protracted care, misdirected 
 sympathy, superstitious dread, fidgets, per- 
 
14 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 verted imagination, unrestrained passion, 
 and bad temper. From these cruel ene- 
 mies of health let us hope to be delivered. 
 But on the other hand, how it helps one to 
 be well to cherish tranquillity of mind, 
 content, calm faith, an imperturbable spirit, 
 freedom from undue care, reasonableness, 
 and personal discipline. 
 
 " The body constantly acts on the mind: 
 this is now universally recognized. It is 
 not as often noticed how the mind acts 
 upon the body. A mind strengthened by 
 truth and a determined purpose will sup- 
 port a feeble body, and enable it to do 
 wonders. Mental excitement often cures 
 bodily disease. There are authentic cases 
 of persons given over by their physicians, 
 who resisted death and saved their lives 
 by a strong determination not to die. 
 Any influence which rouses the mind to 
 action will often cure the body. One day 
 we shall have a mind-cure hospital, where 
 bodily disease will be relieved by applica- 
 tions to the mind. Meantime, how much 
 can be done for invalids by visits from 
 cheerful, bright, entertaining visitors, — 
 by religious influences which inspire faith 
 
A MIND-CURE HOSPITAL. 1 5 
 
 and hope, and not doubt and fear. What- 
 ever turns the mind out of itself, causes it to 
 look up, interests it in helpful truths, helps 
 the body too. " — James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 The suggestion of a mind-cure hospital, 
 made seven years ago by the eminent 
 divine and author just quoted, calls atten* 
 tion to the evidences of a belief in the 
 possibility of healing without the use of 
 medicine. Many facts go to show that 
 such a belief has always existed in the 
 human mind, and that such cures have not 
 been uncommon in any age of the world. 
 We read in " Bread Pills " : " Cabalism, 
 exorcism, fetichism, imposition of hands, 
 anointing with oil, touching sacred relics, 
 visiting shrines, spells, amulets, periapts, 
 prayer-and-faith cures, mesmerism, meta- 
 physical healing, are each and all confes- 
 sions of a wide-spread belief that, some- 
 how, Nature is not wholly dependent on 
 the virtues of drugs and regimen, but will, 
 on certain conditions, restore health by 
 short cuts of her own. " 
 
 It does not require great capacity for 
 marvels to enable one to see that history 
 
l6 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 abounds in intimations that what was 
 known among the earlier Apostles as 
 " the gift of healing " is the common pro- 
 perty of the human race. During the 
 centuries antedating the discovery of what 
 is termed rational medicine, on what else 
 did people rely for help in time of sick- 
 ness ? There can be no reasonable doubt 
 that, among all nations in ancient times, 
 the mental treatment of disease was the 
 usual method, and so common that such 
 cures excited no more surprise or remark 
 than the cures wrought by medicine do 
 now. 
 
 This conviction is forced upon the 
 thought when it is remembered that the 
 ancient inhabitants of India, Persia, Judea, 
 Greece, Italy, and Egypt, believed in and 
 practiced mind-cure. The Celtic tribes of 
 western Europe and the British isles held 
 similar doctrines ; and even the barbarous 
 aborigines of this and other countries put 
 faith in magic and incantations. Some 
 may prefer to regard this kind of evidence 
 proof of the superstitious dread of demoni- 
 acal spirits that influenced the credulous 
 people of early times ; but it is produced 
 
HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. \J 
 
 for the sake of impression rather than 
 argument; and what will these same peo- 
 ple infer concerning the generally ac- 
 cepted cures alleged to have been wrought 
 by Jesus and his followers ? 
 
 The Christian fathers and writers bore 
 unequivocal testimony to the reality of 
 mental healing as practiced by themselves 
 and others, and the early records of many 
 of the Protestant religious sects abound in 
 instances of the same sort. Many genu- 
 ine, well attested cases of restoration to 
 health by psychical means have also been 
 reported in more recent years, and are of 
 frequent occurrence at the present time. 
 Here, too, is a mass of cumulative evi- 
 dence that it is useless to deny; for Rev. 
 J. M. Buckley, D. D., a disbeliever, and 
 obstinate opposer of all such phenomena, 
 says in his recent article in the Century 
 Magazine: "After all deductions have 
 been made, the fact that most extraordi- 
 nary recoveries have been produced, some 
 of them instantaneously, from disease in 
 some cases generally considered to be in- 
 curable by ordinary treatment, in others 
 known to be curable in the ordinary pro- 
 
1 8 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 cess of medicine and surgery only by slow 
 degrees, must be admitted. " 
 
 The evidence thus far presented is de- 
 rived, for obvious reasons, from sources 
 outside the ranks of " metaphysical heal- 
 ing," " Christian science," and other pro- 
 fessional mental curing, as taught and 
 practiced by the different schools of heal- 
 ers that have recently sprung up in this 
 country, and are doing what seems to be 
 very wonderful work. It is given in the 
 sincere hope that it will lead those who 
 have never informed themselves on the 
 subject to consider what follows in a spirit 
 of fairness, and to look upon mental heal- 
 ing, not as a new thing announcing itself 
 in these modern times by signs and won- 
 ders, but as a broader development and 
 fuller application of a power that has 
 always been used to some extent for the 
 benefit of mankind. It comes not as a 
 fresh marvel appealing to public credulity, 
 but as a blessing, amenable to and in har- 
 mony with the universal law of being, and 
 resting on a scientific basis of truth that 
 all men are capable of understanding and 
 applying for themselves. 
 
GOD. 
 
 Our age is grossly material. It believes 
 in the reality of lands and merchandise, 
 and trusts its five senses to the last. If it 
 admit the existence of spirits, and that 
 men may sometime be disembodied ghosts, 
 it banishes such supernatural beings to an 
 invisible abode, and goes resolutely about 
 its business, stoically bearing the ills of 
 life as best it may. 
 
 We are about to enter upon the study 
 of a science that treats life from another 
 point of view. It disputes the evidence 
 of the senses and refuses to accept their 
 reports as final. Instead of following the 
 beaten path by which theology has striven 
 for centuries to climb from the material to 
 the spiritual, reasoning from nature up to 
 nature's God, we now reverse the process, 
 and, planting ourselves at the center of 
 being, endeavor to start at the cause and 
 thus be able to account for the effect. 
 
20 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 At the very threshold of his course the 
 student finds himself face to face with 
 the profoundest problems that have ever 
 engaged the human mind. Mental heal- 
 ing, which is the subject treated in these 
 lessons, has a basis in scientific Chris- 
 tianity, and not only cures bodily disease, 
 but introduces a moral reform that har- 
 monizes all being. The right understand- 
 ing of man's relations to the Infinite is the 
 secret of health and the sovereign panacea 
 for every human ill. Inasmuch, then, as a 
 sound mind and a sound body depend on 
 an adequate knowledge of scientific Chris- 
 tianity, and the center of the Christian 
 system is divine, the study of this subject 
 properly begins with the inquiry, What is 
 God? 
 
 The answer to this all-important ques- 
 tion is not to be sought in the dogmas 
 of any church on the one hand, or in 
 the mysteries of occult theosophy on the 
 other, which at best are only mutable 
 human theories and opinions. It is 
 derived rather from the intuitive percep- 
 tion of men of every nation in all ages of 
 the world, that God is Spirit, Soul, or 
 
DOCTRINE OF GOD. 21 
 
 Substance, — and, in the Christian con- 
 ception of Him, the creative Principle and 
 almighty Source of life. God is the name 
 of that higher intelligence that every 
 religion exalts as Deity, and that the 
 Christian faith endows with the superlative 
 attributes of infinite perfection. 
 
 It is fundamental to a true understand- 
 ing of God that He be believed in as the 
 one only Deity, omniscient, omnipotent 
 and omnipresent. Such a comprehensive 
 definition of God divests mental science of 
 many difficulties at the outset; for, if He 
 be all-wise, as Christianity teaches, knowl- 
 edge has a divine origin and is spiritual. 
 If He be all-powerful, whatever else seems 
 to be a power is limited, and therefore 
 finite. If He be everywhere present, 
 nothing in the universe can exclude Him. 
 
 Scientific Christianity, following the 
 example of its great founder and teacher, 
 carries this conception of Deity somewhat 
 farther. When the metaphysician declares 
 God to be the All-wise, he does not admit 
 that other beings in the universe possess 
 less or a limited wisdom. He insists that 
 God is wisdom,^ and there is no other wis- 
 
22 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 dom in the world. To him the statement 
 that God is all-powerful means more than 
 an acknowledgment that the Supreme 
 Being possesses boundless might ; for it 
 denies power to every other being or 
 organism, and affirms God to be the power 
 that moves whatever acts, and produces 
 force wherever it is felt. As no wheel or 
 belt in the machinery of a great factory is 
 able to start itself, but each and all are 
 kept in motion by power communicated 
 from the engine that drives the mill, so 
 every movement in nature and every voli- 
 tion of man or animal is God acting 
 through the thing that moves. Again, if 
 God be everywhere present, everything 
 else must be excluded, because when He 
 fills all there is not room for anything else ; 
 consequently all is God. And these views, 
 it may be remarked, find abundant con- 
 firmation in the statements of the New 
 Testament. " There is one God and 
 Father of all, who is above all, and through 
 all, and in you all." — Ephesians, iv. 6. 
 " There is but one God, the Father, of 
 whom are all things, and we in Him." — 
 /. Corinthians, viii. 6. 
 
GOD IS SPIRIT. 23 
 
 The doctrine of Deity appears clearer 
 when referred to the definition of God 
 already adopted : God is Spirit. Spirit 
 knows all that is known. Spirit acts 
 through everything that moves. Spirit 
 fills the universe with its presence. And 
 from such considerations it is an easy step 
 to the next admission, that Spirit is the 
 only life. All life implies action and is 
 an exhibition of power. Motion, doing, 
 progress, are inseparable from the very 
 idea of life. To say, then, that Spirit, or 
 God, is the only power is to declare that 
 Spirit lives while nothing else is alive ; 
 and the truth that every form of life in 
 God's vast universe is Spirit is the grand 
 central doctrine of scientific Christianity, 
 and the key to all mental healing. 
 
 Observing the evidences of life that 
 appeal to our senses on every hand, we 
 say in the true understanding of the 
 reality: Vegetation has no life in itself, 
 causing it to grow; the stars have no 
 power to traverse their vast orbits ; 
 animals do not possess automatic motion. 
 Material forms are inert and dead. Spirit 
 is the life that puts forth buds and makes 
 
24 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 the grass to spring ; Spirit whirls celestial 
 orbs in their eternal courses ; Spirit uses and 
 operates the muscles of every living crea- 
 ture, making the physical body its servant. 
 God is Substance. By this term is not 
 meant that Deity assumes a tangible, ma- 
 terial body, either in a literal or panthe- 
 istic sense. The word is employed in its 
 original sense, as used by philosophers 
 and theologians, to signify that which 
 underlies all outward manifestations, and 
 causes all material and spiritual phe- 
 nomena. Substance, from its Latin 
 derivation, denotes that which stands 
 under or behind, and sustains whatever 
 rests upon it. And it is worth our 
 while to notice that this definition of God 
 is not new, but has been a favorite one 
 with the greatest thinkers of every age. 
 It is a modern, unscientific use of the 
 word to call one's estate or goods his sub- 
 stance. The true substance is that which 
 underlies all that may be apprehended by 
 the physical senses ; it is that which gives 
 life and motion to material objects, is con- 
 stantly expressing itself in nature, and is 
 the sole reality in the universe. 
 
GOD IS SUBSTANCE. 2$ 
 
 Very properly, then, these words have 
 been chosen to stand for the one infinite 
 Power and Life of the world, — God, 
 Spirit, Substance, — the intelligent gov- 
 erning principle of all being. The oldest 
 Indian Scriptures affirmed that " the world 
 is but a manifestation of Vishnu (the Su- 
 preme,) who is identical with all things." 
 Plato called God " the great Intelligence, 
 Source of all intelligence, the Sun whose 
 light illuminates creation." Jesus meant 
 the same great power when he said, " I 
 am the way, the truth and the life." Paul 
 declared on Mars Hill, that " in him (God) 
 we live and move and have our being." 
 Spinoza wrote, " Whatever is is in God, 
 for He is the sole Substance." Fichte 
 considered God " the moral order of the 
 universe." Schelling exclaimed, " He is 
 the All in All ! " Tennyson thought of 
 God as " the one . . . divine event, 
 to which the whole creation moves." Em- 
 erson embodied the truth in its complete- 
 ness in the sentence : " We learn that the 
 Highest is present to the soul of man, that 
 dread universal Essence, which is not 
 wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all 
 
26 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 in one, and each entirely, is that for which 
 all things exist, and that by which they 
 are ; that Spirit creates ; that behind na- 
 ture, throughout nature, Spirit is present ; 
 one, and not compound, it does not act 
 upon us from without, that is, in space and 
 time, but spiritually, through ourselves : 
 therefore that Spirit, that is, the Supreme 
 Being, does not build up nature around 
 us, but puts it forth through us, as the 
 life of the tree puts forth new branches 
 and leaves through the pores of the old." 
 
 If we accept the doctrine that God is 
 Spirit or Substance, and the only life and 
 power in the whole universe, we are pre- 
 pared for the further deduction that Spirit 
 is one. The ancient mythologies peopled 
 the invisible world with gods and ghosts ; 
 all religions recognize spirits as indi- 
 viduals; the Christian church teaches that 
 every man has an immortal soul, a distinct 
 entity, which will one day quit its bodily 
 tenement and become a naked spirit. All 
 such notions the mental healer confronts 
 with a flat denial, as radical error, and 
 affirms the essential oneness of Spirit. 
 
ALL LIFE IS SPIRIT. 2*J 
 
 This view of the case is inevitable from 
 what has been already stated ; for, if all 
 life be spirit, and spirit be only another 
 name for God, a belief in the existence of 
 spirits would plunge us into an abyss of 
 hopeless polytheism. It should be observed 
 also that the great principle of life is 
 never called the spirit, as though it were a 
 personality, but Spirit, which is not a 
 personality at all, but an all- pervading 
 intelligence, in which we live and move 
 and have our being. God is not a king, 
 ruling over a community of spirits, as 
 Milton pictures him. The true concep- 
 tion was suggested by Jesus in the simile 
 of the vine and its branches. As the all- 
 embracing atmosphere pervades and occu- 
 pies all space so that no vacuum will 
 entirely exclude it, but manifests its 
 presence in different ways, as rushing 
 wind, as the life-sustaining breath of 
 animals and plants, as the vehicle of 
 sound, as the transparent sea in which 
 birds and clouds may float securely; so 
 Spirit contains all, but cannot be con- 
 tained, and makes its presence felt wher- 
 ever life exists or power acts. If it be 
 
28 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 hard to persuade ourselves that the life 
 and intelligence manifest in a particular 
 individual is not a separate entity but an 
 influx of omnipresent spirit, it is also 
 difficult to persuade the judgment that 
 every human being we see is not a sepa- 
 rate personality, but an individual expres- 
 sion of the one Spirit, God. 
 
 Spirit, then, is one, but expresses itself 
 in innumerable ways that take form and 
 appeal to the senses of man for recog- 
 nition. We do not have spirits or 
 souls ; but Spirit has us, and uses our 
 mental faculties as hands and feet. Spirit 
 is one ; that is God. Spirit expresses 
 itself through ideas or intuitions ; that 
 is what we call the spiritual man. This 
 manifestation includes man, as the tree 
 includes the branches. It is very helpful 
 to dwell much in the thought that God is 
 our intelligence and the source of the 
 knowledge about which we think and 
 reason. Spirit suggests the ideas that 
 flash into our minds like sudden lights. 
 Whenever in hours of deep meditation 
 the truth, which had long been hidden 
 and obscure, breaks in upon the under- 
 
SPIRIT NOT PERSONAL. 29 
 
 Standing as an instant revelation, that is 
 Spirit shining in and through us with its 
 awakening presence. Then are we aware 
 that the personality we are wont to 
 consider as ourselves is nothing, but that 
 all our life, knowledge, ideas, and power 
 belong to the eternal Substance, that con- 
 tains and sustains us, and is God. For 
 it is not by learned argument, but after 
 much reflection that the truth at length 
 dawns upon our consciousness. " All 
 goes to show," wrote Emerson, pursuing 
 the same thought, " that the soul in man 
 is not an organ, but animates and exercises 
 all the organs ; is not a function, like the 
 power of memory, of calculation, of com- 
 parison, but uses these as hands and feet ; 
 is not a faculty, but a light; is not the 
 intellect or the will, but the master of the 
 intellect and the will ; is the background 
 of our being, in which they lie, — an im- 
 mensity not possessed and that cannot be 
 possessed. From within or from behind, 
 a light shines through us upon things, 
 and makes us aware that we are nothing, 
 but the light is all. . . , What we 
 commonly call man, the eating, drinking, 
 
30 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 counting man, does not, as we know him, 
 represent himself, but misrepresents him- 
 self. Him we do not respect, but the soul 
 (Spirit), whose organ he is, would he 
 let it appear through his action, would 
 make our knees bend. When it breathes 
 through his intellect, it is genius ; when it 
 breathes through his will, it is virtue ; 
 when it flows through his affection, it is 
 love." Here, then, we catch a glimpse of 
 the grand and inspiring thought that, in 
 our search after truth, it is not necessary 
 to reason it out by painful, laborious 
 study, as though it lay hidden in the human 
 intellect, and must be dug out and brought 
 to the surface. It is not thinking that 
 gives us a new truth, though thought has 
 its legitimate use ; but Spirit or Soul, 
 which is truth itself, breathes through our 
 minds and makes us wise. It is God who 
 knows ; it is man who thinks. 
 
 Another thought arising in this connec- 
 tion is, that Spirit abolishes time and 
 space. We have been so long under the 
 tyranny of the senses, that we habitually 
 classify events by locality and dates. We 
 say it was in Boston, London, or Japan 
 
•TIME ABOLISHED. 3 I 
 
 that such and such things happened yes- 
 terday, a year ago, or in the early ages of 
 the world ; consequently it startles us to 
 learn that Spirit knows nothing of such 
 boundaries, but 
 
 " Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
 Or stretch an hour into eternity." 
 
 It is only in the senses that the distinc- 
 tions of past, present and future are 
 possible ; or that an object occupies a 
 particular place or position in space. 
 These measurements seem to be necessary 
 and real; but philosophy has long ago 
 decided them to be illusions of the brain, 
 not essential to a true understanding. In 
 fact, we ourselves lose sight of them when 
 the spell of dream and reverie is upon us, 
 and the fetters of sense are broken. 
 
 In this as in all else, the first great 
 lesson for the student of mental healing- 
 to learn is to break loose from the 
 bondage of the senses, and see things as 
 they actually are. He must place himself 
 at the center, and not try to reason from 
 the outside of the circle of being. He 
 must start with God, the cause, and not 
 
32 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 with man, the effect. This is what is 
 meant in the opening of this chapter as 
 understanding aright the relation of man 
 to Deity. The errors and deceptions 
 which have occasioned untold evil in the 
 world, leading man to deny God and 
 assert himself as a power and an indepen- 
 dent being, vanish in the light of truth ; 
 and we, if we would know the truth and 
 forsake the false, must turn our faces 
 steadfastly to the sun, until our whole 
 being is pervaded with the clear daylight, 
 and the truth of being, which is the light 
 of men, shall make us free indeed. 
 
II. 
 
 MAN, 
 
 Having considered God the principle 
 and life of the world, the subject that 
 naturally follows is Man, who, according 
 to the Bible, was created in the image and 
 likeness of God, and became a living 
 soul. 
 
 Four hundred years before the advent 
 of Christ, Empedocles, the celebrated 
 Greek philosopher, in his ecstacy at the 
 contemplation of " Nature and the Princi- 
 ples of Things," exclaimed " I am God ! " 
 Jesus lent an implied sanction to the 
 claim of the Hebrew law that men are 
 gods; and a modern sage has written: 
 " The currents of universal being circu- 
 late through me ; I am part and particle 
 of God. " It was no spirit of boastful 
 arrogance that prompted such startling 
 utterances from human lips. They con- 
 tain a deep truth, and point significantly 
 to some elemental secret or fact of being 
 
 33 
 
34 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 which the material thought of the present 
 age seems to have lost sight of. 
 
 The church maintains that man is soul 
 and body, a personal inmate of a physical 
 house ; and out of this doctrine has grown 
 the widely accepted belief that he has an 
 independent material life in this world, 
 and an immortal personal life hereafter. 
 Material philosophy affirms the existence 
 of the human body and the reality of its 
 phenomena, for these can be verified ; but 
 not all of this school of thinkers believe in 
 the soul, since there is no scientific means 
 of proving its existence. The idealists, on 
 the other hand, have always held that 
 man is spirit, and that the spiritual man 
 is the only man of whom we have any 
 trustworthy knowledge. 
 
 Intelligent students of the science of 
 mental healing side with the idealists in 
 asserting that the real man is spirit. In 
 spite of the popular evolution theory, 
 which considers him the last link in a 
 chain of endless development having its 
 origin in the lowest form of animal life, 
 they resolutely set their faces in the oppo- 
 site direction. If God be conceived of as 
 
THE IDEAL THEORY. 35 
 
 the eternal energy and only life of the 
 universe, what other theory of man is 
 possible ? If he have being at all, he 
 must be a manifestation of spirit, and to 
 be understood, must be seen from the 
 Godward and not from the material side. 
 And it is in its definition of man, even 
 more than its theory of Deity, that scien- 
 tific Christianity conflicts with, and often 
 directly antagonizes, the commonly re- 
 ceived beliefs of mankind. 
 
 It should be observed, too, that the 
 ideal view, though fundamental to mind- 
 cure, and firmly held by all successful 
 healers, is not supported by the same sen- 
 suous logic that makes the materialist so 
 sure of his ground. A logic it has, indeed, 
 but its foundations do not rest on arith- 
 metic and demonstration. The material- 
 ist tells you that he takes nothing for 
 granted; that planting his feet on the 
 solid ground of common sense, he accepts 
 what can be verified and no more, believes 
 what the senses tell him is true and ex- 
 perience proves. The materialist claims 
 to found his definitions on facts, so that, 
 secure in the certainty of sensation, he 
 
36 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 knows where he stands, and consequently 
 occupies a position that is impregnable. 
 
 In taking issue with the materialist, 
 disciples of the opposite school of thought 
 do not dispute his logic, or deny that his 
 man of the senses is just what such a 
 view makes him. As a sample of clear 
 reasoning the materialistic hypothesis is 
 irrefragable, and the conclusions irresisti- 
 ble ; and this is one secret of its strong 
 hold on the popular mind, for it appeals 
 to what can be seen and handled, and has 
 experience at its back at every step. The 
 fallacy of the premises appears only when 
 we inquire into the nature of the alleged 
 facts on which the logic is based. " You 
 reason bravely," says the idealist, "and 
 scorn to take anything for granted ; but, 
 tell me, pray, how you know that the 
 reports of the senses on which you rely 
 are true ? " This is the crucial test that 
 exposes the flaw in a system of philosophy 
 that has changed God's fair domain into a 
 waste and made human life a dream of 
 woe. " In the order of thought, the ma- 
 terialist takes his departure from the 
 external world, and esteems a man as one 
 
THE SPIRITUAL MAN. $? 
 
 product of that. The idealist takes his 
 departure from his consciousness, and 
 reckons the world an appearance. " 
 
 The consciousness by which scientific 
 Christianity tests whatever wears the guise 
 of truth has its center in God, that is, in 
 Spirit, Substance, Intelligence. It plants 
 itself on this definition of the infinite, and 
 says that the sole intelligence, and sole 
 life, and sole power in the universe, must 
 be the cause of whatever is, and there can 
 be no other. 
 
 The divine Intelligence, the all-pervasive, 
 brooding Spirit, is ever expressing itself. 
 Omnipotence is creative, and omniscience 
 puts forth ideas, as the tree puts forth 
 branches and leaves. Man is an expres- 
 sion of infinite knowledge, and may be 
 considered an idea of God. But as the 
 twigs and leaves of a tree cannot differ 
 in character from the tree to which they 
 belong, but constitute the tree, so this 
 manifestation or expression of divine in- 
 telligence cannot be unlike that from 
 which it proceeds. Hence we call this 
 idea of God a Spiritual Man, because 
 his essence being the same, he cannot 
 
38 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 be separated from divine intelligence, 
 but is spirit. 
 
 In considering what has just been 
 written, the reader should receive it as an 
 attempt to define in finite human language 
 what, from its very nature, transcends 
 finite limitations, and cannot therefore be 
 expressed in words. Whatever we may- 
 say about the being here designated as 
 the spiritual man, we know all the while 
 that we are only talking about something 
 he is like, for spirit in any of its manifes- 
 tations eludes our grasp and refuses to be 
 described by mortal speech. Yet, by such 
 poor means as these it is possible to assist 
 our conception, and thus come to a right 
 understanding of the truth. 
 
 The spiritual is the real man, the ego, 
 the responsible moral agent, the image 
 and likeness of divine substance. He is 
 not the weak, ignorant, passion-swayed, 
 sick and dying creature that our senses 
 recognize, and which passes in this world 
 for a man. The man we see with bodily 
 eyes has none of the godlike powers 
 ascribed by definition to the spiritual 
 man ; nor does he as we know him more 
 
INCARNATION. 39 
 
 than feebly reflect that higher intelligence 
 whose organ he is. 
 
 As far as it is possible for us to com- 
 prehend, we may conceive the spiritual 
 man to exercise the same attributes that 
 are ascribed to Deity. As each branch 
 shares in the common life of the tree, so 
 the real man shares in all that in our con- 
 ception of Him constitutes the divine 
 perfection of God. Intellectually it helps 
 us to think of man as a personality ; but 
 spiritually he cannot well be separated 
 from the one only substance and intelli- 
 gence, which is Spirit. 
 
 Another helpful view of the case is that 
 the spiritual man stands in his relation to 
 God, as human thought stands related to 
 mind. When mind acts, we say man 
 thinks. When Intelligence expresses 
 itself, we intuitively perceive the idea as 
 the spiritual man. God is the intelligence 
 of the spiritual man. " One mode of the 
 divine teaching," says Emerson, " is the 
 incarnation of spirit in a form, — in forms 
 like my own. " 
 
 Pythagoras taught that the spiritual 
 man is an emanation of Intelligence (the 
 
40 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 world-soul), and partakes of the divine 
 nature. According to the Stoics, he is 
 an emanation of Deity, a breath of God 
 penetrating the body. " I and my Father 
 are one." — Jesus. " When we say, man 
 perceives this or that, it is only that God 
 has such or such ideas." — Spinoza. " God 
 becomes conscious of himself in man : 
 and this man, under the highest form of 
 his existence, manifests reason, and by this 
 reason God knows himself." — Schelling. 
 " Man is both the product and the pro- 
 ducer of the world, the seer and the sight; 
 he is the Absolute Spirit, the concrete 
 expression of God." — Hegel. " We are 
 conscious of a thinking, feeling and acting 
 self, which has no bodily qualities." — 
 James Freeman Clarke. " Man is con- 
 scious of a universal soul within or behind 
 his individual soul, wherein, as in a firma- 
 ment, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, 
 Freedom, arise and shine." — Emerson. 
 
 Retracing our steps we see that the 
 real man is an emanation of divine intelli- 
 gence, and as such is endowed with what- 
 ever attributes are ascribed to Deity. For 
 
THE COMMON SOUL. 41 
 
 the same reason the spiritual man cannot 
 be regarded as a personality, dividing 
 itself into numberless distinct souls, each 
 identified with a human body. This spir- 
 itual entity, very properly called the soul by 
 many writers and philosophers, possesses 
 little in common with that soul which the 
 creeds of the church and the dogmas of 
 materialism assume to be the tenant of 
 each and every human breast, shut in and 
 fettered by physical senses and organs. 
 
 By definition the soul of man is divine 
 intelligence flowing into manifold organ- 
 isms or visible manifestations ; conse- 
 quently there is one soul common to all 
 individual men. Every man " is an inlet 
 to the same and all of the same," and is a 
 channel through which the influx of 
 common or universal life and power is 
 constantly flowing. By whatever name it 
 is known, its essential quality is that it is 
 never the private property of any man, 
 but the soul of the whole; the common 
 heart ; the one deep, eternal power acces- 
 sible to all men ; so that underneath the 
 external disguises imposed by the material 
 senses, all men are one. " It is one light 
 
42 . MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 which beams out of a thousand stars. It 
 is one soul which animates all men." 
 
 Hard as it may be for those who have 
 always thought of man as a personality to 
 realize the doctrine that the soul of man 
 is the common soul of all, there seems to 
 be no other plausible theory that satisfac- 
 torily accounts for what takes place in the 
 practice of mental healing, and for much 
 that belongs to common experience. Due 
 reflection should convince any man as it 
 did Descartes, that the idea of a perfect 
 common intelligence is an infinite, eternal 
 necessity. 
 
 A clear conception of what is meant 
 by the spiritual man is often needlessly 
 involved and made difficult by the misuse 
 or inexact use of the words and terms 
 employed in writing and talking about it. 
 Ignorantly or carelessly people predicate 
 soul, mind, and thought at one time of the 
 sensual man, at another of the spiritual 
 man, and then again ascribe such faculties 
 to God himself. Such verbal license is 
 admissible in popular language where the 
 context informs the reader of the true 
 sense : but in didactic and scientific 
 
 
THOUGHT DEFINED. 43 
 
 language it leads to confusion. On account 
 of the ambiguous looseness with which 
 most of the publications on the subject of 
 mental healing abound, it is necessary to 
 say something here on the right and 
 wrong use of the word thought. 
 
 If the student look in the dictionary he 
 will find that to think is to consider, 
 ponder, meditate, contemplate, commune 
 with one's self, cogitate, muse. These 
 are the common synonyms for think. If 
 we examine them attentively, we find that 
 each of these words signifies an effort of 
 the mental powers. To consider means 
 to sit close to a thing, that is, to study 
 closely with fixed attention. To ponder 
 is to weigh an argument in mind, as a 
 merchant weighs his wares in scales. To 
 meditate means to turn a subject over 
 and over in the mind, to dwell long upon 
 it. To contemplate is to look around us 
 and examine all sides of a question. To 
 commune with one's self is to hold a silent 
 conversation. To cogitate is to pursue 
 with thought, to agitate. To muse is to 
 entertain in a pleasing way that which 
 occupies the mental attention. 
 
44 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 It is easy to see that each and all of 
 these efforts of mind to get at and com- 
 prehend the truth imply toil. We know 
 by experience that such exercises tire 
 the head and exhaust the nervous force. 
 Observe also another characteristic of the 
 mental processes denoted by those seven 
 synonyms of the word think. In perform- 
 ing the function of thinking language 
 is brought into use, as truly as when 
 one person addresses another in audible 
 speech. When you think, you talk to 
 yourself, just as when you speak, you talk 
 to the listener. Thought is the language 
 of contemplation and self-communion, pre- 
 cisely as speech is the language of the lips. 
 
 Thinking means the laborious process 
 by which the brain arrives at conclusions, 
 the language in which it communes with 
 itself when revolving an idea to get at all 
 sides of it; it is the study that wearies 
 the man of the senses. How absurd then 
 to predicate thought of spirit ! Does the 
 infinite power that creates worlds by a 
 simple fiat toil and become exhausted in 
 efforts to discover a fact? Does Omni- 
 science need to argue and ponder in order 
 
WHAT THINKS? 45 
 
 to grasp knowledge? The very concep- 
 tion forbids that we should tax God with 
 such weakness and limitation, or impute a 
 like defect to his own image and emana- 
 tion, the spiritual man. 
 
 The energy and act of the spiritual 
 man consists in knowing. He is recep- 
 tive of the constant influx of divine intel- 
 ligence. His knowledge is intuition, ap- 
 prehension, intellection. Thought is the 
 function of the mind, a process, brain labor, 
 cerebration. In strict scientific language 
 philosophy teaches that Deity knows with- 
 out thinking, and the toil of contempla- 
 tion is the necessity of a limited mind. 
 
 The inquiry, What is it that thinks? 
 introduces us to the man whose bodily 
 presence is known through the senses. 
 That complex organism is what is gov- 
 erned, molded, correlated, and brought 
 into unity as a body; is what the meta- 
 physician calls the man of the senses. 
 
 From what has been premised it goes 
 without saying that this sensuous creature 
 is defined by limitations. His brain is the 
 laboratory of thought. He fails to exhibit 
 many of the virile qualities with which the 
 
46 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 spiritual man is endowed. His speech and 
 actions betray his frailty, whatever the 
 point of view from which he is studied. 
 
 This man of the senses scientific Chris- 
 tianity declares to be not the real man, 
 but only a reflection. Truly says James 
 Russell Lowell, 
 
 " Man, Woman, Nature, each is but a glass 
 Where the Soul sees the image of herself." 
 
 That the soul makes the body is one of 
 the truisms of philosophy. That the 
 body itself is destitute of life, of power, of 
 feeling, of intelligence, and is simply an 
 organ through which the spiritual man or 
 soul acts is another well established pro- 
 position. That it seems to be endowed 
 with activity and conscious intelligence is 
 not strange, for the sensuous, material 
 man, seeing only the reflection and not 
 the real man that produces it, commits 
 the mistake of putting an illusion for the 
 reality. To every beholder this reflection 
 is precisely what he thinks it is : to the 
 materialist it is all that is implied in the 
 term man ; to the idealist it is the unreal 
 shadow cast by the true man. 
 
ILLUSIONS OF SENSE. 47 
 
 The great obstacle met with at the very 
 threshold of the study of healing science 
 is this illusion of the senses, which cheats 
 us with mere appearance. Indeed, expe- 
 rience shows us that there is no more 
 difficult task than to convince one of his 
 error when the testimony of the senses is 
 at fault. The child in a moving railroad 
 car thinks every object he passes is reced- 
 ing from him. The ancients believed the 
 earth to be flat, and that the sun journeyed 
 from east to west athwart the sky. To 
 the uninstructed the horizon line is that 
 on which the earth and sky appear to 
 meet. Thunder was once supposed to be 
 the destructive agent in a discharge of 
 electricity, and storm-clouds were thought 
 to move in the direction of the local wind. 
 The light of knowledge has changed all 
 these beliefs, and is constantly under- 
 mining some cherished delusion of the 
 race ; the wise are not as positive of any 
 assumed fact as they once were, — why 
 should this dream of the sensuous man be 
 so hard to dislodge ? 
 
III. 
 
 MATTER. 
 
 " He who has never doubted the exist- 
 ence of matter," said the eminent French 
 economist Turgot, " may be assured he 
 has no apitude for metaphysical inquiries." 
 
 It is the maxim of common sense and 
 the school of experience to believe in mat- 
 ter, take things for what they seem, and 
 cultivate a worldly thrift. To be thus 
 minded promotes animal comfort, and is 
 thought indispensable to temporal suc- 
 cess. Hard necessity keeps our feet upon 
 the earth ; poverty and distress are the 
 "beadles" that summon us to attend to 
 material concerns. As long as the human 
 child needs food, and clothes, and shelter, 
 the homely laws of gravitation, chemis- 
 try and mechanics must be learned and 
 obeyed; and every infraction of them, 
 whether willful or through ignorance, is 
 punished with remediless disaster. 
 48 
 
THE EVIDENCE OF SENSE. 49 
 
 But while the practical man builds 
 houses, weaves cloth, plants fields, and 
 minds the shop and mart, he is reminded 
 in a thousand ways that nature around him 
 is not fixed and final. He notes how 
 Spring, the great magician, creates a new 
 world out of clods and mold; how Sum- 
 mer unfolds its myriad germs and paints 
 the flora that Autumn turns to dust and 
 blows away with a breath. He marks the 
 changes of growth and waste in his own 
 and other animal bodies. He learns that 
 in the struggle for existence, he may 
 employ thought as well as brute force, 
 and by inventive skill put all the powers 
 of nature under tribute to do his will. In 
 moments of lofty contemplation he dis- 
 cerns with Heraclitus, that " this restless, 
 changing flux of things which never are, 
 but are always becoming" points to a 
 higher power behind the visible world, and 
 leads him to distrust the evidence of his 
 senses. As the murmur heard in a shell 
 hints of the roar of the far off sea that was 
 once its home, so the shifting panorama 
 of nature, the instability of all mundane 
 things, leads up to the conclusion that all 
 
50 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 matter is steeped in thought, and its qual- 
 ities the registers of thought. 
 
 " Let visions of the night or of the day 
 Come, as they will ; and many a time they come, 
 Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
 This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
 This air that smites his forehead is not air, 
 But vision, — yea, his very hand and foot — 
 In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
 And knows himself no vision to himself, 
 Nor the high God a vision." 
 
 If now we withdraw from the dusty- 
 thoroughfares of toil and study nature, we 
 perceive that the various objects on which 
 the eyes rest cannot possibly have any 
 existence without a mind to perceive them, 
 or out of the mind which thinks about 
 them. For what are the objects of the 
 external world but the things which we 
 perceive by the senses ? And what do 
 we perceive besides our own sensations ? 
 
 What we are wont to call the external 
 world exists in the mind and nowhere 
 else. We enter a room. It is inclosed by 
 walls, and contains furniture, pictures, 
 books and ornaments. These the senses 
 call real things, because they may be seen 
 
THE THEORY OF KANT. 5 1 
 
 and handled. But examine the evidence 
 more closely. What is sight ? Simply a 
 sensation reaching the mind through the 
 eye. What is touch ? Simply a sen- 
 sation conveyed to the mind through 
 the fingers. All we have any knowledge 
 of is the sensation, which is mental ; so 
 that the world we consider to be outside 
 of ourselves exists in our brain, and would 
 otherwise be a perfect blank. This state- 
 ment, however, must not be carried to 
 absurd extremes ; for, as Bishop Berkeley 
 well remarks : " Whenever bodies are 
 said to have no existence without the 
 mind, I would not be understood to mean 
 this or that particular mind, but all minds 
 whatsoever. It does not therefore follow 
 that bodies are annihilated and created 
 every moment, or exist not at all during the 
 intervals between our perception of them." 
 Realizing that the law of causation 
 requires that mental sensations be pro- 
 duced by something, Kant and his follow- 
 ers assumed that there is a rational object, 
 unknown and, in the nature of the case, 
 unknowable, from which the sensation 
 takes its origin. This final cause they 
 
52 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 called in their language Ding an sick, the 
 thing in itself. This term philosophy 
 has translated into the Greek compound 
 nvumenon, that which is perceived; and 
 its representation in consciousness, which 
 is the sensation, they called phenomenon, 
 an appearance. Finally in place of the 
 unknown and unknowable noumenon, 
 Berkeley and other idealists substituted 
 spiritual substance, which is intelligence. 
 The true position of one who holds the 
 ideal theory of matter, at the present day, 
 may be stated thus : The mind is con- 
 scious of a certain number of congruent 
 sensations, called objects, sounds, odors, 
 or other qualities of matter. Being 
 impotent to decide whether there is any- 
 thing outside the mind corresponding to 
 the sensations, he declines to say that 
 objects exist absolutely and independently 
 of thought, but declares them to be, as 
 they appear to us, phenomena produced 
 by something within him. 
 
 In constructing a theory of matter, 
 scientific Christianity avails itself of the 
 doctrines of idealism already pointed out, 
 
IDEAS AND OBJECTS. 53 
 
 and adopts the method of philosophy in 
 the main. Beginning with the proposition 
 that all substance is Spirit, and Spirit is 
 all, the mental healer plants himself on the 
 assertion that there can be only one sub- 
 stance in the universe; therefore matter 
 is not. substance, but reflection. 
 
 The supreme cause of what are called 
 material objects is idea. But it has 
 already been shown that ideas, or intui- 
 tions, are the prerogative of the spiritual 
 man, and not of the man of the senses. 
 It follows, therefore, that it is the spiritual 
 man who sees, hears, smells, tastes, and 
 feels. Mind, which belongs to the man 
 of the senses, is the laboratory of thought, 
 and thought has access to the bodily 
 senses and organs. 
 
 Keeping these distinctions clear before 
 us, we observe that ideas constantly seek 
 expression in thought; or, in other words, 
 they flow through the mind. Hence there 
 is something in the mind which is an 
 emanation of ideas, and corresponds to 
 ideas. If the mental functions be normal 
 and harmonious, the emanation is perfect, 
 and the correspondence exact. It is these 
 
54 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 emanations of ideas about which we think, 
 and thought is forever striving to convert 
 them into conclusions or facts. Facts are 
 a product of thought, as cloth is a pro- 
 duct of the loom. 
 
 When thought perceives any object, as 
 a tree or bird, there is something in the 
 mind that corresponds to an idea held by 
 the spiritual man, or the noumenon of the 
 philosophers. The external reflection of 
 this something in the mind, this mental 
 perception, is what is called an object, and 
 the reflections taken together constitute 
 nature, or the material world. 
 
 The plain conclusion is that everything 
 exists in its relations to ideas. Matter 
 has no existence apart from thought, and 
 may be resolved into thought. The phi- 
 losopher's "matter" is simply an abstrac- 
 tion. " There is a sense," says Dr. C. C. 
 Everett, in his work on " The Science of 
 Thought," " in which water, ice, and vapor 
 are the same ; yet they are very different. 
 Water is not ice, neither is it vapor, 
 though it is potentially both. The ab- 
 stract chemical formula is the same for all. 
 Water, ice, and vapor is each HO. So it 
 
UNIVERSAL THOUGHT. 55 
 
 is with thought and the outer reality in 
 their relations to one another. Neither is 
 the other, yet each is at heart what the 
 other is, and the formula for one is the 
 formula for the other. " Granting the 
 force of this illustration, the metaphysi- 
 cian adds that thought contains all that is 
 essential to matter, and matter is primarily 
 thought. 
 
 Nature : landscape and sky, sea and 
 main, city and hamlet, animal and plant 
 life, each and all reflect thought and are the 
 product of thought ; not necessarily your 
 thought or my thought, but of common 
 or universal thought. And this truth 
 should not be forgotten, for it is essential 
 to a right conception of the subject. If a 
 general statement be made that thought is 
 the creator of our world or any particular 
 object therein, the objector attempts to 
 refute the argument with the assertion, 
 that there are thousands of objects in exis- 
 tence of which we could never have 
 thought, may never have heard. But when 
 the captious doubter has cited a single in- 
 stance of concrete or abstract existence 
 that proves not to have been originally a 
 
56 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 thought of somebody, it will be time 
 enough to rally to the defense. Berkeley 
 goes even farther in his concessions to his 
 critics, and says to them : " I am content 
 to put the whoie upon this issue: if you 
 can but conceive it possible for one ex- 
 tended movable object, or in general, for 
 any one idea, or anything like an idea, to 
 exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving 
 ir, I shall readily give up the cause. . . . 
 When we do our utmost to conceive the ex- 
 istence of external bodies, we are all the 
 while only contemplating our own ideas, " 
 
 As a result of the theory herein pre- 
 sented and explained we have the follow- 
 ing brief formula: Intelligence descends 
 into the spiritual man as ideas; ideas 
 descend into the mind provoking thought; 
 thought is reflected as matter and its 
 phenomena. 
 
 Matter and its phenomena being con- 
 cepts and external reflections of finite 
 thought, partake of the qualities and limi- 
 tations of the medium through which they 
 pass. To secure a faithful photograph of 
 the original, the artist must have his 
 instrument in perfect working order, and 
 
NATURE A REFLECTION. 57 
 
 the plate that is to receive the impression 
 nicely sensitized. If the mental concepts 
 which emanate from ideas are to corre- 
 spond perfectly, and if the reflections of 
 thought as matter are to be faithful, the 
 delicate laboratory of thought must be in 
 perfect working order, 
 
 "That mind and soul according well, 
 May make one music. " 
 
 The considerations here urged upon the 
 attention lead irresistibly to the conclu- 
 sion that the outlying world as it appears 
 to us, as well as our own material bodies, 
 is like that impalpable semblance of an 
 object thrown back by a mirror or a sheet 
 of water. Our objective world is as truly 
 a return of ourselves to ourselves as is 
 the reflection of the glass before which we 
 stand. We smile at the fable of the dog 
 which dropped his bone and attacked his 
 own reflection in the stream ; but do we 
 not repeat this canine folly w T hen, aban- 
 doning reality, we put our trust in the 
 illusions of material sense ? 
 
 If man's being were a harmonious 
 whole, the correspondence of his mind to 
 
58 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 ideas and the reflection of his thought 
 would be perfect, and all material forms 
 proceeding from him would be beautiful 
 and true. Indeed, there was doubtless a 
 period in the history of the human race 
 when these conditions were actually ful- 
 filled, when nature and the physical body, 
 mind and spirit, were in harmony. The 
 traditions and sacred writings of all 
 nations allude to a primitive type of 
 man who was colossal and had power 
 over nature and every created thing. 
 Like the world famous Merlin, all the 
 elemental forces were his loyal vassals ; 
 he brought things to pass by magic 
 instead of toil, and could assume any 
 material form, or become invisible at 
 will. 
 
 " Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit 
 alters, molds, makes it. The immobility 
 or bruteness of nature is the absence of 
 spirit ; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, 
 it is obedient. . . . Every spirit builds 
 itself a house; and beyond its house a 
 world ; and beyond its world a heaven. 
 . . . What we are that only can we 
 see. " — Emerson. 
 
MATTER A REFLECTION. 59 
 
 Matter is the reflection of ourselves, 
 modified by thought. There is a sub- 
 stantial idea known to the spiritual man, 
 to which each material object or thing 
 corresponds. In nature we see the reflec- 
 tion of our thought; thought corresponds 
 to the generating idea or intellection. 
 Material forms are more or less exact 
 imitations of what exists as substance; 
 and each organ of the human body corre- 
 sponds to something in the spiritual man. 
 Frivolous jesters make themselves merry 
 over this doctrine of the ideal philosophy, 
 by carrying it to a literal extreme. But 
 it must not be forgotten that what appears 
 to the bodily senses as form, exists to the 
 spiritual man as law. Jesus truly said, 
 " Spirit hath not flesh and bones. " 
 
 The questions naturally arise : Are 
 mental and bodily defects reflections of 
 incomplete or impotent thought ? And 
 how are we to account for puny or incap- 
 able thinking, if the spiritual man be all- 
 puissant ? 
 
 Theologians have tried to solve this 
 problem by inventing an abstraction called 
 
60 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 evil ; and the gifted poet Milton mourn- 
 fully sings 
 
 " Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world, and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden." 
 
 But this monster of their own creating 
 has caught them in a dilemma from which 
 they are unable to extricate themselves. 
 From all such delusions it is the privilege 
 of the student of metaphysics to turn away, 
 and find a true and satisfying answer in 
 a knowledge of the science of being. 
 
 The answer to the second question 
 should be given first: it is simply the 
 affirmation that the spiritual man posses- 
 ses all the attributes that belong to Sub- 
 stance or Intelligence. Being such, the 
 ideas that descend into the mind as con- 
 cepts are perfect, and can be nothing else. 
 The defect is surely not in the spiritual 
 man or any emanation of spirit. 
 
 To the senses the processes of thinking, 
 the bodily organs, and nature in general 
 are defective. They are not true reflec- 
 tions of pure concepts, and the man is not 
 
REALITY AND APPEARANCE. 6 1 
 
 in harmony with himself. To the spir- 
 itual man, on the contrary, there are no 
 such defects, and no discord mars the 
 serene harmony of being. How is this 
 difference to be explained ? The solution 
 is not far to seek. 
 
 The spiritual man is reality; the man 
 of the senses is only an appearance. One 
 is positive, the other negative ; one knows, 
 the other reflects ; one is substance, the 
 other corresponds to substance ; one is 
 life, the other a mode of expressing that 
 life ; one is power, the other an organ of 
 power; one is divinely perfect, the other 
 fallible; one is infinite, the other finite. 
 
 Defect, that is, the want or lack of 
 something necessary to perfection, is the 
 distinguishing characteristic of the man 
 we see. We cannot trust his judgment, 
 because he does not know; we cannot 
 trust his will, because he has no power; 
 we cannot trust his conduct, because he 
 has no virtue. He is limited on all sides, 
 and is simply the negative expression of 
 all that constitutes the true man. 
 
 What then is it that has come to be 
 recognized as evil? It is simply absence 
 
62 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 of good, — the blank occasioned by with- 
 drawing the light; the chill by which the 
 lack of heat is detected ; the sense of suf- 
 focation when free air is excluded. 
 
 More than two thousand years ago the 
 essence of the theory herein advanced was 
 announced by Plato, and is thus skillfully 
 summarized by George Henry Lewes : 
 
 " The phenomena which constitute what 
 we perceive of the world (that is, the world 
 of sense) are but resemblances of matter 
 to ideas. In other words, Ideas are the 
 forms of which material Things are cop- 
 ies; the noumena, of which all that we 
 perceive (by the senses) are the Appear- 
 ances {phenomena). But we must not 
 suppose these copies to be exact ; they do 
 not at all participate in the nature of their 
 models ; they do not even represent them, 
 otherwise than in a superficial manner. 
 Or perhaps it would be more correct to 
 say, that Ideas do not resemble Things ; 
 the man does not resemble his portrait, 
 although the portrait may be a tolerable 
 resemblance of him ; a resemblance of his 
 aspect, not of his nature." 
 
IV. 
 
 DISEASK. 
 
 In our consideration of disease it is not 
 necessary to enter into any fine-spun, 
 lengthy definition of the term, nor need 
 we trouble ourselves with the classifica- 
 tion on which physicians rely. Pathology 
 concerns the body, where the ailment 
 appears, and helps to locate it. But to 
 the mental healer what the doctor names 
 disease and its physiological cause are 
 alike effects with which he need not 
 meddle. He looks beyond all these to 
 the real cause in thought, and addresses 
 his treatment to that. For him, therefore, 
 the most general and inclusive definition 
 is the best. 
 
 Ease, as we all know, means freedom 
 from pain, trouble, and annoyance of any 
 kind; absence of anything that ruffles or 
 frets either mind or body ; it is a state of 
 tranquillity. Disease is precisely the 
 opposite of ease. It is the condition when 
 63 
 
64 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 tranquillity is disturbed in any way. The 
 mental healer does not .care by what med- 
 ical name the distress is known ; it may be 
 nervousness, dyspepsia, asthma, fever, — 
 words all alike to him, since the effects 
 they denote are simply reflections or 
 registers of wrong thinking. 
 
 But while technical terms signify little 
 in the science and art of mental cure, it is 
 of importance to get and retain a firm 
 grasp of the thought that the real man is 
 not diseased, cannot be, and knows nothing 
 about it. " It is only the finite that has 
 wrought and suffered ; the infinite lies 
 stretched in smiling repose." What is 
 called disease is one of the defects belong- 
 ing to the realm of thought and its phe- 
 nomena; and it is to the senses alone that 
 man ever seems to be sick. 
 
 How, then, is disease, which seems so 
 real, to be explained ? 
 
 The spiritual man, as we have already 
 learned, is intelligence ; to him belong all 
 the perfections ascribed to Deity. So 
 intimate is the relation of the two, that we 
 cannot separate them in our thought, or 
 tell where God, the Supreme Author, 
 
INVERTED THOUGHT. 65 
 
 ceases, and Man, the Idea of God, begins. 
 The true Man is not a personality, but 
 life, knowledge, power, descending into 
 the laboratory of mind. But though the 
 primal man did not separate himself in 
 thought from God, the metaphysician 
 holds that he did at length come to think 
 that intelligence was his own, to have and 
 to use. Not that the spiritual, or real, 
 man changed, and appropriated what did 
 not belong to him ; but thought, which 
 was very powerful so long as it corre- 
 sponded to idea, assumed itself to be an 
 independent power, and asserted authority 
 over the senses. This was inverted 
 thought; or, more literally, thought turned 
 over, turned upside down. 
 
 As soon, therefore, as the man of 
 thought or the senses began to think he 
 was something of himself, mind was no 
 longer a pure emanation of spirit, a me- 
 dium of all intelligence; but lack of knowl- 
 edge, limitation, led man to think as of 
 himself. Out of this sprang the belief 
 in personality, and the reflection of his 
 thought became fixed, and crystalized into 
 material form. 
 
66 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 This inverted thinking once established, 
 man soon forgot that he was godlike, and 
 made the discovery that he was no longer 
 protected in his uprightness, but was 
 exposed to dangers, seen and unseen, and 
 liable to be hurt. This was the origin of 
 fear, and fear is the parent of all the ills 
 that flesh is heir to. The spiritual man 
 knows nothing of fear, because he is su- 
 perior to all and recognizes no other 
 power. The man of the senses creates 
 his own enemies. 
 
 From what has been said, it becomes 
 plain that bodily disease is simply the 
 reflection of inverted thought ; and if 
 thought itself be wrong, the phenomenon 
 or visible manifestation of thought will 
 also be wrong; so that it is literally true 
 that all disease is the working out of dis- 
 turbed or imperfect thought in the tissues 
 and functions of the body. 
 
 A case may be cited to illustrate the 
 meaning: A middle-aged man who has 
 suffered many years with chronic rheuma- 
 tism, until it is torture for him to move, 
 has also an excitable temper, a despotic 
 
CAUSE AND EFFECT. 6*] 
 
 will, and is so intolerant that he cannot 
 abide opposition, but flies into a towering 
 rage if he is crossed. He has had many 
 physicians who ascribe the painful inflam- 
 mation of his joints to an improper secre- 
 tion of uric acid; and his nervousness 
 and irritability are easily accounted for 
 by the prolonged suffering he has en- 
 dured. This case presents the same 
 conditions to the mental healer, but his 
 conclusions are different. To him the 
 bodily trouble is a reflection or effect of 
 lack of mental ease ; and the unamiable 
 nature results from a dominant feeling 
 that other people are enemies seeking to 
 oppose the poor man's wishes and thwart 
 his plans. In treating the case, the doc- 
 tor addresses remedies to the disturbed 
 secretions which are an effect, while the 
 mental healer directs his to the primary 
 cause which is fear. 
 
 It may not in every case be as easy to 
 trace effect to cause, as it is in the one 
 here given. The fear is not always read- 
 ily discerned. Nor should it be forgotten 
 that between mental fear and physical 
 disease the relation is often very subtle 
 
68 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 and easily missed. That there is a caus- 
 ing fear wherever disease is present is 
 made certain on other grounds, even if 
 we fail to detect it in every specific 
 instance. For the grand defect of the 
 man of the senses is that he is aware of 
 limitation, and this very weakness makes 
 him conscious of danger and a liability to 
 harm. The man of inverted thought is 
 afraid, because he does not know. 
 
 A little reflection convinces us that 
 fear plays a large part in mental expe- 
 rience. " In the affairs of life," says the 
 author of " Bread Pills," " men consult 
 their fears more than they do their hopes ; 
 they are afraid, not only of the impalpable 
 pestilence that walketh in darkness and 
 the destruction that wasteth at noon-day, 
 but of a thousand impending calamities, 
 supposed to lie in wait for them. The 
 prosperous fear the loss of wealth ; the 
 poor dread the wolf that haunts their 
 door; the robust are afraid of accident, 
 and the delicate are alarmed at the men- 
 ace of disease ; the child shrinks from 
 punishment, and the aged shudder before 
 the King of Terrors. Men even project 
 
FEAR. 69 
 
 their thoughts beyond the grave, and are 
 appalled by a fearful looking for of judg- 
 ment and fiery indignation in the world 
 of ghosts. Indeed, so habituated is the 
 mind to apprehension, that men look 
 for evil from every source ; as though 
 calamity were their birthright, and pros- 
 perity a prize to be wrenched from the 
 teeth of ill luck and failure by sheer 
 violence. 
 
 " The case were surely bad enough if 
 the poor (human) child learned no worse 
 ills than those which menace the physical 
 world. But fond parents and conscien- 
 tious teachers hasten to let loose upon him 
 a whole menagerie of moral bugbears and 
 goblins. Then the merciless hordes of 
 doubt, worry, gossip, deceit, envy, hate, 
 anger, malice, revenge and slander, de- 
 scend upon him with cruel ferocity. Su- 
 perstition haunts him with maleficent 
 demons and fiends ; he is menaced by bad 
 fairies, scared by ghosts, appalled by spec- 
 tres, upbraided by conscience, scourged 
 by remorse, filled with abject terror of his 
 god, tempted by his devil, in despair of his 
 heaven, aghast at his hell." 
 
70 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 Disease, as a condition to which any 
 individual of the human race is liable, 
 exists in the common, or universal mind. 
 The law that physical exhaustion, ex- 
 posure and contagion are likely to produce 
 illness has been established by common 
 thought, and influences all mankind. A 
 particular disease that prostrates you may 
 not originate in your thought, but in the 
 mind of some one else. A young child 
 may be made sick by the anxiety of the 
 mother. We live in an atmosphere op- 
 pressed with a belief in the danger of 
 disease on every hand. Disease is im- 
 posed on the race as a birthright. We 
 commit the folly of the ancient Mexicans, 
 who, as soon as an infant was born, 
 shrieked in his unconscious ears : " Child, 
 thou art come into the world to endure, 
 suffer, and say nothing ! " 
 
 The study of human anatomy, physi- 
 ology, and hygiene acquaints the medical 
 man with the structure and functions of 
 the body, and enables him to detect the 
 presence of disease, construct laws of 
 health, and prescribe the penalty for 
 breaking them. But if such knowledge is 
 
THE TRUE LAW. /I 
 
 power in the hands of the skillful physi- 
 cian, it likewise enslaves both him and 
 his patients, by fixing in their thought a 
 legion of hitherto undiscovered dangers 
 that threaten the physical well being, and 
 the fear that they may transgress an in- 
 exorable code at any moment. The 
 inevitable consequence of popularizing 
 such studies by introducing them into the 
 common schools, though by no means 
 intended, is to fill the common mind with 
 apprehensions of evil, from which it 
 might better be exempt. Is it a good 
 thing to know a hundred laws that are 
 not obeyed, if thereby we multiply the 
 very fears that engender disease ? 
 
 The true and the only law on this 
 subject, that it is necessary for us to know, 
 is that if Spirit, the eternal power, has 
 need of the reflection we term the human 
 body, that body cannot suffer harm. And 
 it may be useful to inquire who made the 
 laws of hygiene, and on what authority do 
 they rest ? Are they anything else than 
 the voice of finite mind asserting itself 
 against the infinite ? The whole super- 
 structure of medicine crumbles and falls 
 
J2 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 to the ground, when we know that the 
 body and all its diseases are simply phe- 
 nomena of the material senses and finite 
 thought, while the real man who is spirit 
 knows nothing of them. It is a sufficient 
 answer when arraigned at the bar of 
 physical law to reply that, since matter 
 has no life, and disease is not a reality 
 but an illusion, your laws are inoperative 
 and a dead letter, except so far as they 
 have the effect to scare the timid. Once 
 assured that you are the power and disease 
 is a fiction, eternal truth will be a wall of 
 adamant around you, to guard you from 
 every harm. 
 
 We can scarcely realize the tyranny 
 of the senses under which the world 
 groans. So long has this usurper held the 
 throne of reason and been acknowledged 
 as an authority, that it is no easy task to 
 depose him, and recognize once more the 
 rightful king. Reduced to its simplest 
 form, the question is one of veracity. 
 The senses say matter can suffer pain ; 
 God says matter is insensible. The 
 senses declare a man sick ; God says the 
 real man knows nothing of disease. The 
 
HEREDITARY DISEASE. 73 
 
 senses make laws of health and affix sick- 
 ness and death as penalties for breaking 
 them ; God says man is spirit and health 
 is harmony. " The God whom we serve 
 is a God of health," said Rev. F. D. 
 Maurice, "the enemy of sickness and 
 death." 
 
 When we come to see that all disease 
 exists in the mind as disturbed or inverted 
 thought, the classification of diseases 
 becomes as useless and artificial as are 
 the laws of health made by the students 
 of medicine. But since these distinctions 
 have become firmly fixed in the common 
 mind, it may be well to speak of some of 
 them. 
 
 Diseases believed to be transmitted 
 from parent to child are called hereditary. 
 These the mental healer usually finds it 
 difficult to deal with, because of the strong 
 prevailing belief that tendencies and traits 
 acquired at birth are stereotyped and per- 
 manent. How this came to be the case 
 is easily understood: children seldom or 
 never lose the external and distinctive 
 marks received from their parents, but 
 
74 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 retain whatever of family resemblance 
 they may have shown in infancy. Reason- 
 ing from analogy, people naturally con- 
 cluded that if the external likeness of off- 
 spring to parent is so lasting, the same 
 thing must be true of that which is trans- 
 mitted through the blood. But no one 
 who understands the unreality of what is 
 called disease will think for a moment 
 that it can ever be inherited, or that it can 
 resist the power of truth on account of 
 the popular theory of heredity. 
 
 Contagious and infectious diseases are 
 so simply because the common thought 
 has made them so, and the same is true of 
 poisons. These influences could have no 
 power to affect the body except through 
 thought, for all disease exists in thought, 
 and involves the tissues of the body only 
 as fast and as far as mind determines to 
 let it. Any man who thoroughly believes 
 this statement might be exposed to con- 
 tagion and malaria without the slightest 
 danger of harm, or might even swallow 
 poison and take no hurt. Dr. Al Watts 
 believes that the bite of a rabid dog will 
 have no more effect upon his flesh than 
 
ALL DISEASE MENTAL. 7$ 
 
 an equally severe bite of a healthy dog, 
 and has repeatedly put his faith to the 
 test. 
 
 Another grave distinction insisted on by 
 the doctors is destroyed by the knowledge 
 that all disease is in thought. They dis- 
 criminate between mental and physical 
 disease, and call the former by the name 
 insanity. But we see that a consumptive 
 or dyspeptic is quite as insane as a luna- 
 tic, since each is deluded by the creations 
 of his own brain, and each must be cured 
 in the same way, if his recovery is genuine. 
 The only real difference between indiges- 
 tion and a disorder of the brain, as the men- 
 tal healer regards them, is in conduct; but 
 one is a cheat of the senses quite as much 
 as the other, and in either case the real 
 man, who is spiritual, is always sane. 
 
SIN AND DEATH. 
 
 The word Sin is a term created by 
 theologians to denote a class of departures 
 from moral rectitude commonly consid- 
 ered transgressions of the law of God ; dis- 
 obedience of divine commands ; or any 
 violation of God's will, either in purpose 
 or conduct. As usually understood it 
 covers more than the defects that belong 
 to the man of the senses, for it assumes 
 all human beings to be accountable for 
 their choice of good or evil, and therefore 
 applies to acts of volition. 
 
 Scientific Christianity does not recog- 
 nize the definition of theology, but holds 
 that, strictly speaking, there is no sin. It 
 is not necessary to admit that any man 
 intends to go astray; and what is called 
 sin exists only in thought which has be- 
 come inverted; for right thinking corre- 
 sponds to ideas, and cannot depart from 
 the truth. The spiritual man, then, does 
 7 6 
 
UNSOUND DOGMAS. 77 
 
 not regard iniquity in his heart, or diso- 
 bey the commandments of God. But 
 while this science does not give counte- 
 nance to any unsound dogmas concern- 
 ing man's moral condition, it regards the 
 moral as well as the physical defects of the 
 man of the senses as proper subjects of 
 treatment, and because sin is the name by 
 which they are usually recognized, speaks 
 of them as such. 
 
 We have already seen how man, by 
 assuming knowledge and power to be his 
 own, thought himself into a false position, 
 and established what seemed to his in- 
 verted thought an independent life for the 
 physical body. Carrying this deflection 
 still farther, he imagined himself to be 
 separate from the divine, and held God as 
 an enemy, as the Bible declares : " The 
 natural heart is at enmity against God, is 
 not subject to His law, neither can be. " 
 Having taken this attitude, the ancient 
 Hebrews regarded Jehovah as a despotic, 
 arbitrary ruler, who loves and rewards his 
 loyal subjects, but hates his enemies, and 
 punishes both them and their children 
 with implacable ferocity. 
 
?8 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 The dread of sovereign vengeance 
 which such a view inspired caused man to 
 invent a code of arbitrary laws, which he 
 declared to be the utterances of the terri- 
 ble Jehovah, who had affixed a fearful 
 penalty for the violation of each and every 
 command. No love, no fatherly tender- 
 ness for his children entered into this 
 inverted picture of the relations existing 
 between the all-powerful Creator and his 
 creatures on earth, — it was an irrespon- 
 sible tyrant, wroth with his disobedient 
 subjects ; and helpless, ignorant vassals, 
 trembling and cringing at his feet. 
 
 It is needless to add that we have been 
 describing a picture drawn by inverted 
 thought, and no concept of a true, harmo- 
 nious man. It is the horrible dream of 
 the man of the senses, wandering away 
 from his Father's house, and feeling him- 
 self estranged and unprotected. This 
 wretched distortion, this absolute perver- 
 sion of the divine truth of being, is the 
 prolific source of all the fears that haunt 
 man with forebodings of impending evil, 
 and of the entire catalogue of self-created 
 errors that theology calls sin. And yet 
 
THE CURE OF SIN. 79 
 
 there is nothing in all this that alters the 
 fact that God is good, is love, and has 
 made all His works with infinite perfec- 
 tion ; that the real man is spirit, cannot 
 be separated from God, and has no fear of 
 danger or knowledge of sin. 
 
 The only aspect of sin with which men- 
 tal healing is concerned is its cure. Con- 
 sidered as it appears to the senses, each 
 wrong or inverted thought, each transgres- 
 sion of what is called the law of God has 
 its material reflection in the body as dis- 
 ease. It has already been stated that all 
 disease is engendered by fear ; the con- 
 verse is also true that all inverted thought 
 is reflected in the body. Every kind of 
 ignorance, selfishness, and crime is in- 
 cluded in the catalogue of causes of phys- 
 ical disturbance : Bigotry, fanaticism, 
 superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy, impiety, 
 profanity, ingratitude, injustice, revenge, 
 contempt, jealousy, sarcasm, fault finding, 
 scandal, slander, indiscretion, excess, in- 
 temperance, dissipation, concupiscence, 
 perfidy, passion, vice, enmity, ill temper, 
 asperity, hate, anger, fret, rage, malice, 
 rancor, cruelty, brutality, abuse, worry, 
 
80 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 misanthropy, and a thousand other forms 
 of discord, assert themselves in bodily dis- 
 orders. So surely is this true, that an 
 intelligent healer pays no heed to the 
 alleged disease with which a sufferer 
 claims to be afflicted, except so far as it is 
 a sign of a lack of mental harmony that 
 caused it. It may not always be possible 
 to determine just what peculiar shade of 
 wrong thinking has registered itself in the 
 diseased body; but since sickness and 
 pain are produced by thought and in no 
 other way, the healer can safely rely on 
 the law of cause and effect in every case. 
 
 The next topic for consideration is 
 readily suggested by what has just been 
 stated. Healing which goes no further 
 than the cure of the bodily ailment is no 
 healing at all. It is like the superficial 
 healing over of a sore in the flesh, which 
 to the practiced eye of the surgeon is a 
 sign of morbid and not of healthy action. 
 It is an attempt to cleanse the stream 
 while the impurities in the fountain are 
 suffered to remain. There can be no 
 sound health unless the cause is reached 
 and mental harmony is restored. Hence 
 
COMMON THOUGHT. 8 1 
 
 it is that the terms " mental healing " and 
 " mind cure " derive their significance ; 
 for the change that is wrought in every 
 case of genuine work, reaches beyond the 
 reflected disturbance in the body, which is 
 dis-ease, to the wrong thinking in the 
 mind, which is lack of harmony. 
 
 Growing out of this discussion of what 
 is termed sin is another phase of the sub- 
 ject, that is of great importance in healing. 
 The law of common thought already ex- 
 plained shows that the particular cause of 
 disease may not exist in the sufferer's 
 individual mind, but in the common 
 thought, or the mind of another person. 
 A mother's fear may be reflected in the 
 body of her child ; a doctor's fear may be 
 reflected in the body of his patient; the 
 fear of an infectious or contagious disease 
 prevailing in the community may be re- 
 flected in the bodies of those who contract 
 the disease. 
 
 Because of the action of common 
 thought and the law of reflection here 
 insisted on, every person is liable to be 
 influenced for better or for worse, by those 
 
82 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 with whom he associates or is brought 
 into contact in any way. Especially is it 
 true that our health may be seriously 
 affected by the thought of those about us, 
 so long as we remain unprotected and un- 
 guarded. 
 
 So far as we know, thought is the 
 chosen medium through which spirit 
 power manifests itself to the senses of 
 man. The influence of mind over mind 
 is, therefore, very potent, whether the 
 thought exerted be normal or inverted. 
 Right thinking is life and health to mind 
 and body, diffusing around him who exerts 
 it an atmosphere of harmony and healing 
 virtue. Inverted thinking kills all true 
 life, disturbs both mind and body, and 
 reflects the image of disease on all matter 
 within the circle of its influence. Wrong 
 thought may be termed " mind-kill " ; 
 right thought, " mind-cure." 
 
 The time is coming when people will 
 understand that the mental atmosphere in 
 which they live has as much to do with 
 health as does the condition of the air they 
 breathe. The value of nutritious diet, 
 cleanliness and pure air is beyond dispute, 
 
THOUGHT ATMOSPHERE. 83 
 
 though one may exist where these are 
 lacking. The value of an atmosphere of 
 right thought on the part of those with 
 whom our lives are associated is immeas- 
 urably greater, with this difference : it 
 cannot be dispensed with without the 
 most serious consequences. The reason 
 why the force of this remark is not appre- 
 ciated is because there is no one living 
 who knows by experience what would be 
 the effect of having all that others think 
 about him normal and harmonious. 
 
 It startles us to be told that the famil- 
 iar dictum, " All men are mortal," is sim- 
 ply a law made by inverted thought, and 
 not an eternal fact. But the logic of the 
 theory of life herein announced leads to 
 such a conclusion. Originally man knew 
 himself to be heir to eternal life. Then, 
 when the man of the senses had assumed 
 an independent personality for himself, 
 and finding that personal self unprotected, 
 began to be afraid he should be hurt, he 
 thought also that the forces of nature and 
 his enemies had power to destroy his life. 
 This established to the senses the fear and 
 
84 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 the fact of death. Incongruous as the 
 statement is in reality, so accustomed 
 have our ears become to it, that it excites 
 no surprise to hear the distorted perver- 
 sion of the truth uttered, that man must 
 pass through the gate of death in order to 
 attain immortal life. 
 
 To the inverted thought of the senses 
 all experience proves death to be the end 
 of material existence, and the entrance, as 
 faith would have us hope, to endless life. 
 The universal decease of animal and veg- 
 etable life and the decay of material forms 
 are the stubborn " facts," on which the 
 senses base the theory of mortality. Yet, 
 in spite of the prevailing belief, the delu- 
 sive silence is often broken by strong 
 voices crying : " Whoso liveth and believ- 
 eth in me, shall never die ! " 
 
 " There is no death ; 
 What seems so is transition ! " 
 
 Scientific Christianity announces in 
 unmistakable accents the joyful doctrine 
 of eternal life. There is but one life. 
 The real man cannot die, and the man of 
 the inverted senses will at length be trans- 
 
TRUE RESURRECTION. 85 
 
 formed in the image and likeness of the 
 ever living, perfect One. " This corrupt- 
 ible must put on incorruption, and this 
 mortal must put on immortality," wrote 
 Paul the Apostle, many centuries ago. 
 As we become restored to health and 
 soundness, we outgrow the gross notion 
 that man is mortal, and put on the true 
 immortality day by day. 
 
 The true gospel of the resurrection is 
 not the resumption of animal life after a 
 human body has been laid away for ages 
 in the sleep of death. " I am the resur- 
 rection and the life," said Jesus. As we 
 rise out of the darkness and death of finite 
 thought, we take on spiritual life and 
 knowledge which are eternal ; a change 
 brought about, not by the decease of the 
 body, but by the purification of thought. 
 Our resurrection day is the time when 
 we ascend into the sunlight of eternal 
 harmony. 
 
VI. 
 
 HEALING. 
 
 In the preceding chapters the theoret- 
 ical ground on which mental healing is 
 based has been considered. It begins 
 with the conception of God as Spirit, Soul, 
 Substance, the only Intelligence, Life, and 
 eternal Energy of the world. This is the 
 Fact of all facts ; the " moral order of the 
 universe;" the final cause of all that is, 
 and to which all that is must be referred. 
 
 Intelligence or Spirit constantly mani- 
 fests itself in form, — descends as the idea 
 we call the spiritual man, the image of 
 God, and the possessor of knowledge and 
 life. This, the real, man, being an idea of 
 God, has its correspondence in thought, 
 which belongs to the man of the senses; 
 and the reflection of thought in external 
 nature and the physical body constitutes 
 the material world. Right thinking legiti- 
 mately produces entire harmony between 
 the spiritual idea, the correspondence, and 
 
WHAT IS HEALING? 87 
 
 the reflection. But the mental healer is 
 brought into contact with inverted thought, 
 and has to deal with its legitimate conse- 
 quences, which to the senses appear as 
 disease, sin, and death. To be fitted for 
 his work it is necessary for him to 
 thoroughly consider and understand what 
 he proposes to do. 
 
 Mental healing, considered as an act, 
 prompts the question, What is it to heal ? 
 Considered as a result, we naturally ask, 
 What is a mental cure ? The first ques- 
 tion is subjective, and relates to the power 
 and means by which health is restored; 
 the other is objective and concerns the 
 person who is made well. 
 
 The power that heals is Spirit, because 
 there is no other power in the universe; 
 this is a clear deduction in the premises, 
 that no amount of words can make any 
 plainer. The means through which the 
 healing power works seem to be various ; 
 but we will first consider those with which 
 the mental healer is directly concerned. 
 
 It is indispensable to success in healing 
 that the person who practices the act be 
 
88 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 in a proper condition. The nearer he 
 approaches that point where he realizes 
 the omnipotence of Spirit, and rises su- 
 preme to the suggestions of the senses, the 
 better ; for he can do no good work so long 
 as his own mind is infested with doubts. 
 For the time being, the healer acts for his 
 patient, thinks for him, grasps and holds 
 the truth for him. If these conditions are 
 fulfilled, so that the healer rises supreme 
 to the illusions of the senses, and sees the 
 physical man he is treating only as an 
 appearance, while the real man is clearly 
 recognized, the inverted thought of the 
 patient is changed, so that spirit power 
 affects him and he is healed. 
 
 What the healer does for the person 
 he treats is to assist him to change his 
 thought; for in every case, no matter 
 what may seem to be the trouble with the 
 patient, it is the inverted thought, the 
 belief in the reality of disease, that stands 
 in the way of recovery. Once change his 
 thought, and spirit power conquers his 
 delusion and he becomes well. Remember 
 that the disease exists in the mind; its 
 cause is there ; a change of thought de- 
 
TRUTH HEALS. 8<? 
 
 stroys the cause, and makes the man 
 whole, because there is no longer any in- 
 verted thought to reflect. 
 
 To put the explanation in other words, 
 we may say : The healer by his right 
 thought works on and overcomes the 
 thought of fear in the mind of the patient. 
 He thus suggests to the patient that he is 
 not sick but is well. And why does that 
 convince the patient? Simply because 
 the healer is right and the patient is mis- 
 taken. Truth is stronger than error, and 
 the actual contact of the two opposites 
 invariably results in the triumph of the 
 greater. To insure the desired result, 
 however, the healer must first be thor- 
 oughly convinced of the truth he seeks to 
 establish in the thought of his patient, 
 so that not a shadow of doubt flits through 
 his own mind ; for if he but partially 
 relies on the truth himself, the benefit 
 will be only partial. But when the healer 
 attains the necessary condition, the vital 
 spark of truth instantly passes to the mind 
 of the patient under treatment, and he, 
 too, is convinced ( or converted ) and 
 healed. 
 
90 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 If this be the correct view of healing as 
 an act, it is evident that, strictly speaking, 
 the person we call the healer or curer, 
 does not perform any cure at all, but all 
 healing is self-healing. It is the patient 
 who experiences a change of thought, a 
 conversion, that prompts him to avail 
 himself of the healing power, by letting 
 Spirit, which is health, have its way 
 through him. The change takes place 
 in him, and nowhere else. We must not 
 lose sight of the fact that all the healer 
 can do is to help the patient to change his 
 thought; the true healing act is between 
 the power that heals and the person cured, 
 a sacred transaction with which no third 
 party can intermeddle. 
 
 Since a change of the inverted thought 
 of the sick person is all that can be pro- 
 duced by extraneous influence, the treat- 
 ment of a professional healer is not the 
 only means of securing it. While a 
 majority of cases are affected in that way, 
 there are well attested instances to show 
 that anything that will enable the sick 
 person to change his thought, may put 
 him in a condition to receive spiritual 
 
ALL CAN BE CURED. 9I 
 
 healing. A text from Scripture or some 
 other writings may be brought to his mind 
 with such force as to do this, or some 
 sudden event may startle him out of his 
 chronic delusion. 
 
 It is in this way alone that we can 
 account for cures that seem to result from 
 prayer, a resort to relics, charms, and 
 other things believed to possess peculiar 
 virtue. This is why good results follow 
 any one of the thousand absurd acts, by 
 the performance of which superstitious 
 and credulous people seek to be restored 
 to health. 
 
 Many mental healers admit, and no 
 doubt believe, that it is not possible to 
 treat successfully until the patient comes 
 into the right attitude ; that he may by 
 setting up a direct opposition prevent the 
 most powerful healer from reaching his 
 case and doing him any good. This is a 
 mistake, a result of inverted thinking on 
 the part of the mental healer, for which he 
 should be treated and of which he should 
 be cured. If, when treating, the meta- 
 physician reflects omnipotence, no patient 
 can resist its Divine influence. When he 
 
92 ' MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 fails of success, he has failed to reflect the 
 unlimited power. 
 
 In answer to the second question : 
 Considered as a result, what is a cure? 
 there would seem to be but one possible 
 reply, in view of what has already been 
 explained concerning the nature of the 
 healing act. A mental cure is the dis- 
 covery made by a sick person that he is 
 well. It is not convalescence, a growing 
 strong, after a period of prostration, a 
 gradual restoration of vigor or abatement 
 of pain ; the effect produced, whatever it 
 may be, is instantaneous, and comes to 
 the knowledge of the patient as a dis- 
 covered fact, and not as a gradual process 
 of recovery. 
 
 " After its own law and not by arith- 
 metic is the rate of the soul's progress to 
 be computed. The soul's advances are 
 not made by gradation, such as can be 
 represented by motion in a straight line ; 
 but rather by ascension of state, such as 
 can be represented by metamorphosis, — 
 from the egg to the worm, from the worm 
 to the fly. . . . With each divine 
 
THE USE OF MEDICINE. 93 
 
 impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of 
 the visible and finite, and comes out into 
 eternity." — Emerson. 
 
 In this connection it may be profitable 
 to speak of the use of medicine and other 
 means, instead of relying on true meta- 
 physical healing. What is the proper 
 attitude of the mental healer toward med- 
 icine, manipulation, electrical treatment, 
 mesmerism, mediumship, and conformity 
 to hygienic laws ? Are these means of 
 cure of any value ? and should they be 
 resorted to in connection with mental 
 treatment ? 
 
 It is safe to say that if drugs, manipula- 
 tion, and the other methods of treatment 
 enable a practitioner to do his patient 
 some good, true mental healing would 
 enable him to do much more; for while 
 these are liable to fail, spirit power, being 
 the sole power, and source of all power, is 
 sure. Medicine helps only so far as it is 
 believed in ; but being a material remedy 
 addressed to a material man, its use serves 
 to divert attention from the only power 
 that can heal, and to confirm a belief that 
 
94 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 there is independent power and life in 
 material things. The healing potency of 
 drugs and every other therapeutic agent 
 that appeals to the senses is derived 
 through the established belief that such 
 things cure. Medicine is freighted with 
 thought, so to speak, the thought that it 
 will heal ; the physician who prescribes it, 
 the pharmacist who compounds it, the 
 nurse who administers it, the patient who 
 takes it, all feel that it will produce the 
 desired effect. 
 
 The not uncommon notion that drugs 
 possess absolute, inherent curative virtues 
 of their own involves an error. Arnica, 
 quinine, opium, could not produce the 
 effects ascribed to them except by imputed 
 virtue. Men think they will act thus on 
 the physical system, consequently they do. 
 The property of alcohol is to intoxicate; 
 but if the common thought had endowed 
 it simply with a nourishing quality like 
 milk, it would produce a similar effect. 
 
 A curious question arises about the 
 origin of healing virtues, if it be admitted 
 that all drugs were originally destitute of 
 them. We can conceive of a time in the 
 
THE VIRTUE OF DRUGS. 95 
 
 mental history of the race when no thera- 
 peutic value was assigned to certain drugs, 
 when, in fact, it was not known that they 
 possessed any. How did it come to pass 
 that common thought, or any thought, 
 endowed them with healing virtue, in the 
 first place? Simply in this way: Man 
 finding himself unprotected, and liable to 
 be hurt by the elements in the midst of 
 which he lived, forgot the true source of 
 healing, and began to seek earnestly for 
 material remedies for disease and wounds. 
 The desire for something led to experi- 
 ments ; and with each trial there was 
 associated the hope that the means applied 
 would prove efficacious. Then what was 
 at first an earnest hope came at length to 
 be a belief ; and thus, by gradual steps, a 
 belief in the contents of the entire phar- 
 macopoeia was established. 
 
 That it is the belief in the virtue of the 
 drug, rather than the medicine prescribed, 
 no one knows better than the physician, 
 who often has his most signal success with 
 cases where no real medicine is admin- 
 istered. Every doctor understands the 
 value of what is termed placebo, that is, a 
 
g6 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 counterfeit or sham prescription of no 
 potency whatever, given merely to quiet 
 the patient, and cause him to believe that 
 something is being done for his ailment. 
 " Belief can kill ; belief can cure," is a 
 maxim as true as it is old. 
 
 This position finds ample illustration in 
 the history of patent medicines, which do 
 not succeed in one case in ten, because of 
 any medicinal properties they possess, but 
 because they are persistently advertised; 
 and the well-known story of the scurvy 
 cure invented by the Prince of Orange is 
 a fair sample of hundreds of anecdotes 
 that might be related, to show that faith 
 in drugs is more efficacious than medicine. 
 At the siege of Buda, in 1625, when the 
 garrison was on the point of surrendering 
 that stronghold to the investing army, in 
 consequence of the prevalence of scurvy 
 in an aggravated form, the Prince of 
 Orange availed himself of the common 
 faith in placebos to produce a remedy. 
 He caused a few bottles of sham medicine 
 to be distributed among the sick soldiers, 
 as a sovereign and infallible specific for 
 the disease. A few drops of this harmless 
 
ILLUSTRATION. 9/ 
 
 liquid produced the most astonishing 
 effects. Men who had not moved their 
 limbs for months were seen walking the 
 streets, sound, straight, and whole; and 
 many, who declared they had only been 
 made worse by the treatment previously 
 received, recovered in a few days. 
 
VII. 
 
 TREATMENT. 
 
 Ability to treat disease successfully im- 
 plies a clear, adequate understanding of 
 the subjects considered in these pages, 
 and an intelligent and skillful application 
 of them to a definite end. In order to 
 heal yourself and others, it is not enough 
 to be intellectually convinced that the 
 theory of mental science is correct, there 
 must be power to do as well as to see. 
 
 Remember that the conditions of effec- 
 tive treatment concern yourself first and 
 chiefly. It is time enough to consider the 
 object of treatment after you are in the 
 right condition. You must vividly realize 
 that Spirit is the only healing power, — ■ 
 an omnipotent energy, acting constantly 
 throughout all mind and all nature. 
 Realize also the oneness of spirit, as the 
 absolute life of the universe. Realize that 
 man is the image and likeness of God, and 
 98 
 
WHAT TO THINK. 99 
 
 is therefore spirit. You are spirit, your 
 patient is spirit, and there is no other 
 being; for the real man is spirit. The 
 effect of this recognition of God and of 
 man as a spiritual being, this attitude of 
 thought, is to make the truth habitual and 
 familiar to yourself ; not a theory held and 
 accepted by the mind merely, but a living 
 reality, the center and essence of all 
 reality, fully possessing and dominating 
 your own thought. 
 
 Affirm to yourself that the real man is 
 spiritual, and consequently has intelligence, 
 life and power; while as an individual 
 he is a reflector or medium of these poten- 
 tial attributes of spirit. If your thought 
 dwells on the material man, or man of the 
 senses, think of him as only an appearance, 
 never as the real man. Even his thoughts 
 are not the acts of the real man, so long as 
 they are inverted. Be clearly persuaded 
 also that with his bodily condition you 
 have nothing to do ; his physical defects 
 you are not to see, for your work is with 
 his mind. All disease is in the mind ; 
 what is external is nothing but reflection 
 and unreal. Address the cause, change 
 
100 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 the thought, and the reflection will take 
 care of itself. 
 
 The tendency of holding clear and 
 correct views of truth yourself will be to 
 diffuse around you an atmosphere of 
 health. What you really know to be 
 true, that will ypti affirm and declare to 
 your patient, and nothing else. You may 
 tell him the truth ; that is well. You 
 may think the truth about him ; that is 
 still better. But you (the spiritual man) 
 must know the truth ; that heals him. 
 Understand that you are not to heal him ; 
 spirit heals, and spirit alone. But you 
 are spirit, and when the real man in you 
 is in actual authority, that authority is felt 
 and obeyed by all who come within your 
 influence, because all thought belongs to 
 the common mind. 
 
 A question often arises in the mind of 
 the beginner whether the power that cures 
 will act, and whether the patient will feel 
 it and respond to it. This solicitude 
 makes him think that it is his business to 
 explain the nature of the power to the 
 patient, to pray God that it may act, and 
 then to tell the patient that it is operat- 
 
RIGHT THOUGHT IS POWER. IOI 
 
 ing on him. This is entirely needless. 
 Spirit will and does act. The healing 
 power is never lacking for an instant 
 Nor need you have the least concern 
 about your patient. He will respond, and 
 it is not necessary to inquire about the 
 effect produced ; for can you not realize 
 that spirit is the life of all matter, works 
 through all forms, and cannot be resisted ? 
 Never doubt for a moment that all right 
 thought benefits your patient, and if you 
 rest in the truth, you cannot harm him, 
 for harm is a name for lack of truth. 
 Know, then, that your right thinking will 
 change his wrong thinking, so that he will 
 know, as you do, that he is not sick. 
 Only inverted thought — doubt — can kill ; 
 right thought is life. 
 
 But genuine treatment is something 
 more than has yet been indicated, and 
 goes beyond thought, to that which tran- 
 scends thought. If you, the healer, live in 
 the truth ; if you are really loyal ; if the con- 
 viction becomes so strong in you that you 
 come to see that the man of the senses is 
 nothing and. that spirit is all; you may 
 rise into that higher sphere, where con- 
 
102 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 viction becomes knowledge, and you no 
 longer think about the fact, for the idea, 
 the knowledge of the spiritual man, fully 
 possesses you. This is the supreme mo- 
 ment when healing takes place. When 
 you have reached that lofty state, every 
 barrier disappears, and the light bursts 
 upon the patient's vision, and the work is 
 complete. 
 
 In practice it seems to be more difficult 
 to successfully treat one's self than to treat 
 another person. The reason for this is 
 that, when personally under the influence 
 of supposed disease, the appeal of the 
 senses is more forcible than when the 
 deception shows itself in another. But 
 that one can conquer the results of his 
 own inverted thinking, there is not the 
 slightest occasion to doubt ; and we may 
 feel very sure that such a personal victory 
 is one of the very best preparations for 
 success in the work of treating others. 
 We must not, however, make the mistake 
 of supposing that he who would attempt 
 to bring healing to others must first be 
 sound himself. If it were his thought 
 
NO SET RULES. 103 
 
 instead of spirit power that heals, such 
 might be the case. But the experience of 
 many, who are very successful as mental 
 healers, proves conclusively that it is 
 possible to give a powerful and effective 
 treatment, while the healer himself has 
 failed to demonstrate the truth in his own 
 person. 
 
 While all treating is one and the same, 
 whether the alleged disease be one thing 
 or another, there are certain conditions 
 that, in the present stage of the art, it 
 is well to take into the account when 
 attempting to treat patients. The sugges- 
 tions here made do not, however, form 
 any invariable rule, and while helpful to 
 some beginners, they may chance to be 
 of no use to others. For it must not be 
 forgotten that effective treatment does not 
 consist in or depend upon any set form or 
 process. But when one is about to test 
 his own powers in a new and untried 
 direction, the methods that have proved 
 serviceable to so many others, may be 
 helpful to him. 
 
 To most persons who consult a mental 
 healer the theory and methods of meta- 
 
104 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 physical curing are novel. They approach 
 him as they would a physician, expecting 
 him to examine the bodily symptoms, and 
 inquire into the history of their supposed 
 complaints. This is but natural, and the 
 young practitioner should be decided in his 
 own mind how he will meet this expecta- 
 tion, what inquiries he will make, and how 
 far he will attempt to explain to a novice 
 what mental healing is. 
 
 It would be impossible in these respects 
 to give specific rules how to proceed in 
 each case ; but certain general considera- 
 tions and directions may be safely relied 
 on. Keep ever before you that your busi- 
 ness is not to medicate the symptoms, but 
 to break the spell that wrong or inverted 
 thought has cast upon the patient. The 
 external evidences of the presence of dis- 
 ease may look frightfully real to you at 
 first; but you must allow them no quarter; 
 you must not even compromise with them ; 
 for your duty, like that of a soldier in the 
 presence of a defiant enemy, is to conquer 
 and banish them. 
 
 Too much talk about the disease as it 
 appears to your patient would tend to 
 
CONVERSATION. 105 
 
 make it seem so real both in your mind 
 and in his, that the inverted thought 
 which it reflects would be hard to dislodge 
 and change. It is not wise, then, to 
 discuss the complaint with your patient, 
 unless there be some valuable object to be 
 gained by so doing. If you see that the 
 patient wants to "free his mind," before 
 he will cordially place himself under your 
 treatment, it may be well to let him 
 rehearse the story of his bodily troubles. 
 Again, if by a little talk or well directed 
 inquiry you are able to discover the fear 
 which causes the apparent disturbance, 
 you have gained a point, and will be able 
 to address your treatment directly to that. 
 But it is not absolutely necessary for you 
 to know the causing fear, or even the 
 name and location of the supposed disease, 
 in order to treat your patient successfully • 
 and you have a decided advantage, if 
 you do nothing and say nothing to invite 
 attention to it. Banish the thought of 
 disease from your own mind and from the 
 mind of the patient as soon as possible. 
 
 If you have good judgment and quick 
 intuitions (qualities proper to every good 
 
106 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 healer,) these are your safest guides in the 
 matter of deciding how much and what to 
 explain to your patient about your way of 
 treating. Some natures will drink in the 
 ideas at once, and be so favorably im- 
 pressed by them as to be able to help you 
 to treat with their own thought. Others 
 are too ignorant or obtuse to compre- 
 hend spiritual ideas at all, and the im- 
 pression of mysterious power produced by 
 silent action is far more convincing to 
 them than any amount of words would be. 
 There is a third class of people with a 
 skeptical bias, in whom any attempted 
 explanation would only provoke a spirit 
 of opposition and argument. These must 
 be convinced by actual demonstration ; 
 for, like Mrs. Gradgrind, they are " invari- 
 ably stunned by some weighty piece of 
 fact tumbling on " them. 
 
 Experience in the work will prove the 
 most helpful guide in the method of 
 dealing with those who present them- 
 selves for treatment. We learn by doing ; 
 and until the beginner discovers a better 
 way, he must trust to tact and his 
 knowledge of human nature, to suggest the 
 
DEALING WITH FRIENDS. 107 
 
 best way of introducing his treatment; 
 never losing sight of the fact that, it is 
 not the manner of approach, but the 
 success of this vital act that opens the 
 door to health. 
 
 When the mental healer has decided 
 how he will approach the case of his 
 patient, he may still be in doubt how best 
 to deal with the patient's friends with 
 whom he is often brought into contact. 
 Friends and attendants who are believers 
 in mental cure, and know what sort of a 
 mental atmosphere is favorable to restor- 
 ing health, may do much to help the 
 metaphysician in his work. But, unfor- 
 tunately, this is seldom the case ; and the 
 friends are usually ignorant on the subject, 
 and innocently burdening the invalid with 
 just that kind of hurtful sympathy which 
 keeps him under a cloud of depression. 
 When such is the case, their absence is 
 more helpful than their presence, and it is 
 desirable to be alone with the patient 
 while treating him. A few well-chosen, 
 hopeful words will tend, also, to inspire 
 the friends with new courage, which may 
 in a measure counteract the depressing 
 
I08 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 influence they unintentionally exert on 
 your patient. 
 
 The effect of a treatment depends, not 
 on its length, but on the condition of the 
 healer who exercises it, and the dynamic 
 power of the thought exerted. The time 
 may be from five to fifteen minutes, ac- 
 cording to circumstances; and, could one 
 always be in the highest condition, a 
 momentary thought would be all-sufficient. 
 To the question whether a healer is ever 
 in such a condition that he is unfit to treat 
 a case, the emphatic answer is no ! Re- 
 member that treating is simply getting 
 yourself into a right frame of mind, so to 
 speak, in regard to the patient. It is 
 rising out of sense into the spiritual 
 realm, — out of the particular into the 
 universal. In the act of treating, you are 
 not to make an effort to impress your 
 patient; you are not to combat him. 
 When you realize the truth, when you 
 have escaped from the dominion of wrong 
 thought and the illusions of the senses, 
 spirit power will do the work, truth will 
 assert itself in your patient, destroying 
 the cause of disease. 
 
INSTANTANEOUS CURE. IO9 
 
 While in theory we may see instan- 
 taneous, complete cure to be the ultimate 
 and possible aim of mental treatment, 
 that superlative power is not yet attained, 
 and we have no authentic evidence that 
 such results are vouchsafed to modern 
 healers. All that can be at present 
 claimed is, that the act by which the 
 inverted thought of the patient is changed 
 may take place very suddenly, — in fact, 
 will be instantaneous, whenever the condi- 
 tions are right ; but the legitimate, inevi- 
 table results of the changed thinking may 
 not appear in the body until later. The 
 law has been made that it takes a certain 
 space of time for the action of the forces 
 that change the condition of the human 
 body, just as it takes time for a seed to 
 sprout and a tree to grow. So habituated 
 are we to the notion of gradual change, 
 that a more rapid operation in nature 
 excites wonder, and is accounted a miracle. 
 While, therefore, patients successfully 
 cured by mental treatment, may recover 
 more rapidly that those who rely on med- 
 icine, instantaneous healing is a result 
 hoped for, rather th^n a realized fact. 
 
IIO MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 Treatments may be given in the presence 
 of the patient or when he is absent, as 
 circumstances seem to require. Which 
 way is more effective cannot be deter- 
 mined by any general rule, but must be 
 left to the discretion of the healer. It 
 may not be well to be confined exclusively 
 to either mode, for each has its advantages, 
 and as good results appear to follow one as 
 the other. Some who treat prefer the 
 absent mode, because it is easier when 
 treating to shut out of mind the bodily 
 presence, and think of the patient only as 
 a spiritual being. As a general thing, 
 however, it is best, when practicable, to see 
 the patient before beginning a course of 
 treatment. 
 
 When called to treat persons suffering 
 from what are termed acute cases, where 
 the progress of the disease is comparatively 
 rapid, and the friends of the sick person 
 feel that something ought to be done to 
 afford immediate relief, prompt, decided 
 action is necessary. The treatments 
 should be frequent, longer than in other 
 cases, and very persistent. In such cases, 
 too, the anxieties and fears of friends and 
 
CHRONIC CASES. Ill 
 
 attendants may be so far aroused by what 
 they believe to be the critical character of 
 the disease, that it is often necessary to 
 treat them, in order to quiet the fear that 
 would otherwise disturb the patient. 
 
 People afflicted with chronic complaints 
 will not, as a rule, apply to a mental healer 
 for treatment, until after they have tried 
 all the resources of medicine. When the 
 specialists have experimented upon them 
 without success, and they despair of 
 getting help in any other way, they come 
 to the mental healer, as a last resort, and 
 often in no very amiable mood. Usually, 
 however, such persons are not disposed 
 to give the mind-curer an equal chance 
 with the physicians, but assume to think 
 that if there is anything in it metaphysical 
 treatment ought to cure them at once. 
 It will be very helpful to the beginner in 
 the work of treating, if he succeeds in 
 discovering by a little preliminary conver- 
 sation, the mental cause of the chronic 
 disease, and this may often be found out 
 without directly asking about it. 
 
 When called to attend young children, 
 do not forget that their diseases are not 
 
112 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 reflections of their own thinking, but of 
 the fears of parents or other persons who 
 have charge of them. They are not old 
 enough, or mature enough, to be afraid cf 
 being sick; but the atmosphere of fear 
 around them in infancy is denser than at 
 any other period of their lives. Reach 
 children, therefore, through the parents or 
 nurses who have them in charge. 
 
 In all his intercourse with patients the 
 mental healer should exercise sound judg- 
 ment and tact. He should keep in mind 
 that Jiis method of healing is not a well 
 established mode, like medicine, in which 
 the public has confidence; but to the 
 majority of people it is virtually a new 
 thing, and is looked upon with a degree of 
 suspicion. It would seem as if there had 
 been a sufficient number of recent cures 
 performed by mental means, to satisfy 
 even the most skeptical of its therapeutic 
 value. But, as a fact, the public is slow 
 to accept the evidences of any new claim, 
 and has a chronic belief in the possibility 
 of being humbugged. Accordingly the 
 mental scientist who wishes to succeed 
 must be very patient, and willing to 
 
HIGHER HEALING. 113 
 
 multiply proof upon proof, and hopefully 
 await the result. 
 
 The two sources of weakness in those 
 who essay to practice mental healing are, 
 a lack of faith in the underlying principles 
 they advocate ; and a rash confidence, 
 that, on close analysis, proves to be a 
 reliance on themselves rather than on the 
 power that heals. It is very easy to mis- 
 take a mental perception of truth for a 
 hearty acceptance of it. It is easy to 
 persuade one's self that he enters upon 
 the work of healing from the highest and 
 purest motives, when in reality the step is 
 taken to gratify some personal ambition. 
 But success in healing is the reward of 
 intelligent, honest endeavor, and of noth- 
 ing else. 
 
 There is a still loftier view of healing 
 to be urged in this connection. While the 
 aim of this book has been to point out the 
 way and means of bodily healing, it cannot 
 have escaped the attention of thoughtful 
 students that the cure of physical disease 
 is, after all, only a secondary end. Scien- 
 tific Christianity has its widest scope when 
 it is regarded and used as an agent of 
 
114 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 reform. The great moral problem in 
 which all good people are interested and 
 for which they labor, is how to cure the 
 manifold defects resulting to the world 
 from ages of wrong thinking on the part 
 of mankind. Religious and philanthropic 
 bodies of men have usually undertaken to 
 bring about the needed reform by means 
 of organized, aggressive war against the 
 vices of society. They would suppress 
 wrong doing, and compel external obedi- 
 ence, by the enforcement of stringent laws. 
 The church, mistaking the sense of the 
 trope that " Spirit is sharper than a two- 
 edged sword," have undertaken to grasp 
 and wield it, not knowing that this sword 
 is impotent except in the hands of Spirit. 
 Those who accept the truths of meta- 
 physical healing come to see that reform 
 is not promoted by fighting. " If my 
 kingdom were of this world," said Jesus, 
 " then would my servants fight." Not by 
 imposing restraints on the actions of men, 
 but by changing the thoughts of men, is 
 reform to be brought about. Set the real 
 or spiritual man in authority, and the 
 problem is solved, because in so doing 
 
HEALING IS REFORM, 115 
 
 you change the cause. The inference, 
 then, is that those who have accepted the 
 truth of scientific Christianity are privi- 
 leged, each in his own sphere, to be 
 promoters and channels of the highest 
 type of reform. The influence of their 
 lives is a blessed gospel of reform to all 
 with whom they come in contact. A true 
 healer cannot help being such a reformer, 
 for his character and right thinking are 
 felt whether he is conscious of it or not. 
 He need not be continually talking reform, 
 or be forming associations for the sup- 
 pression of vice. Let him go about his 
 proper business; and while he is doing 
 with his might the duty that is nearest at 
 hand, Spirit, the light and truth of the 
 world, will shine through him, and so far 
 as he is a transparent medium, will be 
 reflected in the dark minds of those about 
 him, and they, too, will perceive the light, 
 so that the truth shall make them free. 
 
VIII. 
 
 UNIVERSAL TRUTH. 
 
 If the philosophy explained and taught 
 in these pages breathes the spirit of 
 true reform, the truth suggested must be 
 of universal application. While only 
 here and there one may devote himself to 
 the profession of mental treatment, " the 
 leaves of the Tree of Life are for the 
 healing of the nations." Any one may 
 understand and appropriate these simple 
 principles, and receive incalculable benefit. 
 Such doctrines are not the private 
 property of the different schools of mind- 
 cure, and a sealed book to all others. 
 Neither are they a new religion. On the 
 contrary the essentials of this moral, as 
 well as mental and bodily, healing con- 
 stitute the essence of truth as it has been 
 taught by all the great moral teachers of 
 the world. It is the vital spirit, not only 
 of Christianity, but of every religion. It 
 is the spirit of obedience to the one law 
 
MENTAL THEOLOGY. 117 
 
 of eternal Right, which obtains through- 
 out the universe of God 
 
 " New opinions 
 Divers and dangerous, which are heresies, 
 And not reformed, may prove pernicious," 
 
 says Shakespeare. But none need fear 
 the consequences of the sweet and whole- 
 some doctrine of spiritual truth ; which, 
 while it is even older than the race of 
 man, revivifies and reinforces all his 
 notions of truth, whenever it is received. 
 These teachings do not antagonize one's 
 religious views, but simply infuse them 
 with new life. They do not insist on the 
 giving up of any dear forms or modes 
 of work or worship ; for they have to do 
 not with the act, primarily, but with the 
 cause. 
 
 So far as the understanding and recep- 
 tion are concerned, this truth does not 
 seem to depend on one's theology, his 
 learning, or his theory of spirit and 
 matter. If he be devoutly pious, it seems 
 to come to him through the channel of 
 his religious nature ; if he be ignorant and 
 superstitious, it seems to avail itself of his 
 
I\8 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 beliefs in the supernatural ; if he be what 
 is termed a " Spiritualist," he recognizes 
 the one supreme Intelligence as acting 
 through various personal intelligences ; 
 if he dissent from all religious creeds, it 
 impresses him as the ethical force, or 
 great law of the universe. The only 
 element in any creed which is destroyed 
 by the acceptance of this truth is that 
 which is non-essential and selfish; for it 
 comes not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. 
 The truth herein inculcated touches 
 every doctrine and act of religion and 
 piety, investing it with new meaning, so 
 that it is no longer a form, but comes to 
 be the appropriate expression or reflection 
 of the spiritual man. Prayer, for ex- 
 ample, whatever one may believe about it, 
 is seen in the light of this truth to be the 
 action of the real man, as a transparent 
 reflector of spiritual power. Atonement 
 is seen to be that perfect harmony of 
 being, in which mental perception corre- 
 sponds to spiritual ideas, and nature is a 
 true reflection of correct thought. Man is 
 then at one ; the idea and image of God ; 
 an organ through which the influx of 
 
THE BREAD OF LIFE. II9 
 
 spiritual intelligence flows without inter- 
 ruption. 
 
 The line of reflection suggested by a 
 perusal of this book enforces the lesson 
 that it is high time for people to avail 
 themselves of the healing benefits which 
 the reception of the truth would surely 
 bring them. The need of such help as it 
 promises is painfully apparent wherever 
 we go, and man with all his wisdom and 
 scientific skill has failed to invent or 
 discover any substitute for it. The heal- 
 ing art of medicine does not cure all 
 bodily diseases, and is utterly powerless to 
 reach the cause of the trouble and change 
 the inverted thought of the sick ; morality, 
 philanthropy, and religion, (or what these 
 terms popularly stand for,) have failed to 
 reform the world or relieve the misery of 
 human existence ; why should not this 
 new-old truth that the real man is spirit, 
 and cannot be subject to disease, sin, and 
 death, be proclaimed, accepted, and ap- 
 plied as a sovereign remedy for human ills ? 
 
 In his Harvard oration, Professor James 
 Russell Lowell has pointed out that the 
 highest office of education is to "distribute 
 
120 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 the true Bread of Life, . . . and to 
 breed an appetite for it." And what is 
 the " true bread of life," if it be not to 
 know that we are spirit, and may rise by 
 the understanding of truth superior to all 
 the ills of life ? Can there be a higher 
 education than to know God and keep His 
 commandments? to know the truth that 
 sets men free from the bondage of the 
 senses ? 
 
 In the Gospel of St. John we find a 
 very clear record of the teachings of Jesus 
 concerning this bread of life. The people 
 failed to understand the true meaning of 
 the expression, just as people do at the 
 present day. To make it plain and en- 
 force the practical lesson, the great Master 
 reiterated the truth in different phrases, 
 among which are : " Labor not for the 
 meat which perisheth, but for that meat 
 which endureth unto everlasting life." 
 " My father giveth you the true bread 
 from heaven." " I am the Bread of Life : 
 he that cometh to me shall never hunger." 
 " For I came down from heaven, not to 
 do mine own will, but the will of him that 
 sent me." " Every man therefore that 
 
QUOTATIONS. 121 
 
 hath heard, and hath learned of the 
 Father, cometh unto me." " If any man 
 eat of this bread, he shall live forever." 
 " As the living Father hath sent me, and I 
 live by the Father ; so he that eateth me, 
 even he shall live by me." " He that 
 eateth of this bread shall live forever." 
 
 The benefits of accepting and living 
 the great truth which Jesus brought to 
 men from God his Father and the Father 
 of us all, are well expressed in the words 
 that the poet laureate of England has put 
 into the mouth of Prince Arthur: 
 
 " Then might we live together as one life, 
 And reigning witli one will in everything, 
 Have power on this dark land to lighten it, 
 And power on this dead world to make it live." 
 
 When the spiritual man shall come into 
 authority, how true and forcible will be 
 the words of George Herbert, written 
 nearly three hundred years ago : 
 
 " Man is all symmetry, 
 Full of proportions, one limb to another, 
 And to all the world besides. 
 Each part may call the farthest brother; 
 For head and foot hath private amity, 
 And both with moons and tides. 
 
122 MENTAL HEALING. 
 
 " More servants wait on man 
 Than he '11 take notice of. In every path 
 He treads down that which doth befriend him 
 When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
 O mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
 Another to attend him." 
 
 THE END. 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 OF 
 
 Metaphysical Science, 
 
 Incorporated. November, 1886. 
 
 L. M. MARSTON, M.D., President. 
 
 (Normal Graduate of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.) 
 
 CLASSES FORMED MONTHLY. 
 
 TWELVE LESSONS CONSTITUTE A COURSE. 
 
 Students thoroughly and practically taught the Science 
 of Spiritual and Christian Healing. 
 
 NO. 130 CHANDLER STREET, 
 
 BOSTON, MASS. 
 
Mental Healing Monthly. 
 
 A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE FURTHERANCE OF 
 
 THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF SPIRITUAL AND 
 
 CHRISTIAN HEALING. IT IS NOT CONFINED 
 
 TO ANY ONE SCHOOL OF THOUGHT. 
 
 BUT ITS COLUMNS ARE OPEN 
 
 ALIKE TO ALL. 
 
 PRICE, $1.00 A YEAR. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE 
 
 MENTAL HEALING PUBLISHING CO., 
 
 130 Chandler St., Boston, Mass. 
 
 A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST CHURCH 
 
 Has been organized and incorporated in the city of 
 Boston, called "Church of the Divine Unity." 
 Sunday services under its auspices are open to the 
 public. Place of worship, 5 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 
 
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS AM) PAMPHLETS 
 
 ON 
 
 /Heptal Seiei^e apd Qtyristiap Jtealii^, 
 
 FOR SALE BY 
 
 L. M. MARSTON, M.D., 
 
 President of the Mental Science and Christian Healing Association, 
 130 CHANDLER ST, BOSTON. 
 
 The afflicted should bear in mind that thousands of sick: people 
 
 have been cured by Christian Mental Science, many 
 
 by reading the books alone. 
 
 Essentials of Mental Healing, Dr. L. M. Marston $1.00 
 
 Science and Health, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, 590 pp., cloth, post- 
 paid 3.18 
 
 Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics, Dr. W. F. 
 
 Evans : just out, the best yet, cloth, postpaid 1.50 
 
 Primitive Mind Cure, Dr. W. E. Evans, 225 pp., cloth, post- 
 paid 1.50 
 
 Divine Law of Cure, Dr. W. E. Evans, 302 pp., cloth, post- 
 paid 1.50 
 
 Christian Healing, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, postpaid 25 
 
 The People's God, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, postpaid 25 
 
 The Unfolding ; or, Mind Understood, the Healing Pow- 
 er, Mrs. Clara E. Choate, lecture, 21 pp., paper, postpaid. . .26 
 True Christianity: The Basis of Healing with Mind, 
 
 Mrs. Clara E. Choate, lecture, 27 pp., paper, postpaid . . .20 
 
2 CATALOGUE OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS. 
 
 Mental Healing, Mrs. Clara Choate $ .20 
 
 Scientific Possibilities of Mind Healing, Mrs. Clara 
 
 Choate 20 
 
 Mind in Healing, Rev. C. A. Bartol, D.D .10 
 
 The Reason Why, Mrs. Edward H. Cobb, lecture, 17 pp., 
 
 postpaid 25 
 
 The Law of Perfection, Mrs. A. M. Diaz, 10 pp., paper, post- 
 paid 10 
 
 Spirit as a Power, Mrs. A. M. Diaz, 24 pp., paper, postpaid, .25 
 
 Leaves of Healing, Mrs. A. M. Diaz .10 
 
 The True History of Mental Healing, Julius A. Dresser, .20 
 
 Philosophical Realism, W. I. Gill paper, .85; cloth, 1.50 
 
 Personified Unthinkables ; an argument against physical 
 
 causation, Sarah Stanley Grimke, 36 pp., paper, postpaid, .30 
 Mind in Medicine, No. 4, just issued, Rev. C. A. Bartol, 
 
 D.D., postpaid 20 
 
 Trust in the Infinite, Mrs. A. B. Newman, postpaid 10 
 
 Christian Science is not Pantheism, C. M. Barrows, post- 
 paid .10 
 
 Bread Pills, C. M. Barrows, postpaid 35 
 
 Mind over Matter, Emil M. Kirchgessner, 32 pp 25 
 
 Healing Power of Thought, Mrs. E. G. Stuart, postpaid. . .10 
 
 Theosophy of the Christ, J. H. Dewey, M.D 35 
 
 The Word of the Lord, concerning sickness, from Genesis 
 
 to Revelation, G. W. McCalla, 64 pp., postpaid 12 
 
 Metaphysical Queries, W. J. Colville 25 
 
 In His Image, by Eldridge Smith 15 
 
 What is Christian Science? Ursula M. Gestefeld .10 
 
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 Direction for Health on a Metaphysical Basis, Ellen H. 
 
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H. H. Carter & Karrick's Popular Publications. 
 
 THE LILT CENSER. {Illustrated.) 
 Poems and fragments of poems 
 about lilies. A dainty book. Bound 
 in white and gold. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 UNDERTONES. Bound and printed in 
 violet. The key-note of this very attrac- 
 tive book is as follows : — 
 " If I list to sing of sad things oft, 
 It is that sad things in this life of breath 
 Are truest, sweetest, deepest." 
 
 Price, 75 cents. 
 
 GOLDEN AFTERNOON. Love's After- 
 Tears. A very choice collection of short 
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 gold. Suitable for wedding anniversary 
 gift. Made by request to meet such a 
 demand. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 ONLT A LITTLE BROWN SPARROW. 
 
 Beautifully printed in brown. Cover 
 engraved on steel. Price, 35 cents. 
 
 PARADISE, PARADISE. This fa- 
 vorite hymn by W. F. Faber. Illus- 
 
 trated. In white covers, with passion 
 vine in gold. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM CANON FARRAR. 
 
 In paper cover. With cut of Trinity 
 Church, Boston. New edition, enlarged. 
 Bound in white and gold. Put up in a 
 very artistic manner in neat box. Price, 
 75 cents. 
 
 CUPS OF GOLD. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 GOLDEN GLEANINGS. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 MORNING GLORT. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 FAIR THOUGHTS FOR HAPPT HOURS. 
 
 New edition. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 STRAT LEAVES FROM JOHN RUS- 
 KIN. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 SUNBEAMS FROM THE GOLDEN 
 LAND. By Francis Ridley Haver- 
 gal. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 CONSECRATION HTMN. By Francis 
 Ridley Havergal. With photograph 
 of Authoress. Price, 20 cents. 
 
 Any of the above publications sent postpaid, on receipt of price, by the publishers, 
 
 H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 
 
CHRISTMAS, BIRTHDAY, AM) AMIYERSARY CARDS BY MAIL. 
 
 No. 1. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 17 Prang's, Hildesheimer 
 & Faulkner, Ward's, and other finest Christmas and New Tear Cards, to- 
 gether with a handsome double Fringed Card. 
 
 No. 2. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 10 large and fine cards from 
 the above publishers, with 1 fine Frosted Card. 
 
 No. 3. — For SI and 6 cents for postage, a choice selection of 25 beautiful 
 cards of Prang's, Hildesheimer & Faulkner, etc., together with a hand- 
 some illuminated folding Souvenir containing Bell's Across the Snow, 
 Miss Havergal, or King Out, "Wild Bells, Tennyson, or Xmas Bells, Long- 
 fellow. 
 
 No. 4. — For SI and S cents for postage, a selection of 10 of our largest 
 and finest Cards, together with a Mistletoe Memories Bannerette, or 
 what the Poets say about Xmas, fringed with cord and tassel. Publisher's price, 
 75 cents. 
 
 No. 5. — For SI and 10 cents for postage, 10 double Fringed Cards 
 (not folding) , each in a separate envelope, together with an Antique Christ- 
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 Tuck's, and other beautiful cards. 
 
 No. 7. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 5 fine Chromo-litho, 
 printed on Satin in colors. Mounted. 
 
 No. 8. — For SI and 4 cents for postage, 6 large and beautiful Satin 
 Cards, with gilt edge. 
 
 No. 9. — For SI and 8 cents for postage, 8 beautiful Screen Folding 
 Cards, with verses on some, by Miss Havergal, Tennyson, and Longfellow. 
 Retail prices from 15 to 75 cents each. 
 
 BIRTHDAY PACKET. For 50 cents, 10 fine Cards of Prang's, Tuck's, 
 with one large Card, 7x8. 
 
 SUNDAY-SCHOOL PACKET. 30 Marcus Ward's, Prang's, etc., 50 cents 
 and 4 cents for postage. 
 
 STAMPS OR POSTAL NOTES RECEIVED. 
 
 Hand-painted Cards, Pearl Cards, and Cards Carved in Cork, and other 
 Novelties at 10, 15, 25, 50 and 75 cents, and SI each, for Christmas, Birth- 
 day, or Anniversary, which will be selected with care for different tastes and 
 ages, as specified. 
 
 TO TEACHERS ONLY. 
 
 50 Marcus Ward's, Prang's, and other beautiful Cards, no two alike, for SI 
 
 and 8 cents for postage. Better assortment, S3 and 10 cents for postage. A 
 
 very choice selection, no two alike, S3 and 20 cents for postage and registering. 
 
 We refer by permission to Hon. E. S. Tobby, Postmaster, Boston, and to the 
 
 publishers of the Youth's Companion. 
 
 TO AGENTS AND DEALERS, 
 Or ANY ONE ordering S5, and 40 cents for postage and registering, of the 
 above packets, at one time, a SI packet will be sent free, and as the small- 
 est card in any of these packages will sell readily for five or ten cents each, a 
 handsome profit can be realized. 
 Every packet will he sent in pasteboard Protectors, and heavy envelope wrappers, 
 for safe transmission. 
 
 For the convenience of those who desire to save their cards, we have arranged 
 with Marcus Ward & Co. for a line of their artistically designed ALBUMS, at 
 very low pi-ices, which we offer by mail, postpaid : 
 
 ONE ALBUM, cloth bound, toned paper, size Q% X 8)4 . . . . $ .35 
 ONE ALBUM, " " " 8% X \0% . . . . .75 
 
 ONE ALBUM, " " " 10 X 11J£ .... 1.25 
 
 ONE ALBUM, " " " 11 X 14 ... . 1.84 
 
 We recommend large-sized Albums, where room for artistic arrangement of cards 
 is desired. These are the best made and most desirable Card Album in the market. 
 
 H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 
 
WE MAKE A SPECIALTY OF ENGRAVING, STAMPING, ETC. 
 
 Engraving Steel Monogram Die $2.00 
 
 Engraving Steel Address Die 2.00 
 
 Stamping from same (any color), 15 cents per quire, and 15 cents per 
 pack of envelopes. 
 
 Engraving Tlate for Visiting Cards 1.00 
 
 Printing 50 Cards on Heaviest Bristol from same 75 
 
 WEDDING INVITATIONS EXECUTED IN THE LATEST STYLE. 
 Printing letter headings neatly in ttpe, $1.75 per 1000. All work is done under 
 DUr own supervision, and satisfaction guaranteed. 
 
 Any Teacher can order of us the following prices by Mail 
 
 1 Gross Gillott's Pens, 303 85 cents. 
 
 Estabrook " 333 60 cents (as good) . 
 
 Gillott's " 404 45 cents. 
 
 Estabrook " 444 40 cents (as good). 
 
 Spencerian " 1 80 cents. 
 
 Estabrook " 128 60 cents (as good). 
 
 Assorted Sample Dozen, 6 cents. Sent by mail on receipt of price. 
 
 DIXON'S AMERICAN GRAPHITE PENCILS. 
 
 FIVE REGULAR GRADES OF HARDNESS OF LEADS. 
 
 S — Soft. For heavy shading in sketch drawing. 
 
 SI — Soft Medium. The most popular number. 
 
 M — Medium. For professional and desk work, and all finer uses where a harder 
 
 lead than the S M is wanted. 
 H — Hard. A hard, but smooth, lead, suitable for ledger work or outline drawing; 
 
 for civil engineers, architects, draughtsmen, etc. 
 V H — Very Hard. For the finest lines, almost equal to engraving, but still black 
 
 and smooth. 
 
 Price per dozen, 40 cents, and 4 cents postage. 
 
 "HOME CIRCLE" STATIONERY BOXES BY MAIL. 
 
 These papers and envelopes are Extra Heavy, and of the following tints: 
 Cream, Fawn, Drab (light and dark), Violet, Chocolate, Azure, Blue (light 
 and dark), Primrose, "White, Rose, Caledonia, Moss Green. We offer them 
 as follows : — 
 
 1-QUIRE BOX contains 24 Sheets, in 2 Tints, and 24 Envelopes to match, postpaid, $ .40. 
 
 2--QUIRE BOX " 48 " 4 " " 48 " " " .75. 
 
 3-QUIRE BOX " 72 " 6 " " 72 " " " I. IO. 
 
 4-QUIRE BOX " 96 " 8 " " 96 " " " 1.40. 
 
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 H. H. CAETEE & KAEEICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 
 
PAPER BY THE POUND, 
 
 OF ETVB3MY GRADE, 
 
 LOWEST PRICES IN AMERICA. 
 
 We are the New England Agents for the Hurlbut Paper 
 Co. (established in 1822), also for Marcus Ward's Irish 
 Linen Papers, and carry in stock at all times the largest 
 and most complete stock of Folded Papers of any house 
 (wholesale or retail) in Boston, including a large variety of 
 
 BOND , PARCHMENT , FLAX, and LINEN PAPERS, all Weights and 
 Sizes, with Envelopes to match, 
 
 The fine qualities of Bond and Linen papers (now becom- 
 ing popular for business and light correspondence) cannot 
 be obtained except at prices that are often exorbitant. We 
 sell direct from the mills to the consumer, thus giving lowest 
 prices possible. For the convenience of our customers, we 
 will send complete sample sheets of the different varieties 
 of paper and envelopes, with prices and number of sheets 
 
 to a pound for 
 
 FIFTEEN CENTS. 
 
 H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 
 
 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 
 
 
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 ^EH^ INDIANA 46962