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A Last Word About Christian .Science. 



of the times, than as a method of cure. Let a man stand here to tell you 

 of Shakespeare. You know Shakespeare already, and perhaps better 

 than he, and therefore obtain no new information of Shakespeare; but 

 you get information of the man, for he has unconsciously revealed to 

 you his own bias and character in the endeavor to impart information 

 of another. Man's opinion of the world is a confession of character. 

 The age tends to materialism, and we are taught to give the greatest 

 respect to material things: but intelligent men have nevertheless found 

 that it is the imponderables that move the world, which is seen as well 

 in medicine as elsewhere. When the best medical treatment has 

 failed to effect a cure, how often it occurs that some change in the 

 patient's mind — as by some fortunate or wished-for event, change of 

 scene, removal from circumstances which annoy, embarrass or irritate, 

 in short, a change from discontent and despair to contentment and 

 hope — has speedily wrought the desired cure. 



The confidence placed in medicine by the most intelligent physicians 

 is almost always secondary. Medicines do sometimes cure, often ma- 

 terially aid nature in effecting a cure, but are also capable, even in 

 legally qualified hands, of doing indescribable mischief; they must 

 therefore take a subordinate place as curative agents, and are often 

 altogether disappointing. Medicine is a two-edged sword that cuts both 

 ways; an evil, to be used only in order to overcome a greater evil; an 

 agent capable of doing when improperly used as much harm as good. 

 Some may object to these as unsettling statements, and ask, why destroy 

 confidence in the support on which we have so long depended, the staff 

 on which in sickness we have so often leaned ? 



The popular mind has been so long deluded with an excessive belief 

 in medicine, resulting in undue reliance on it and medical men, that 

 we have well-nigh forgotten our personal resources and the healing 

 powers of nature. What wonder then that some, as now, having seen 

 in the treatment of disease repeated proofs of the power of the mind 

 and the uselessness of medicine,— what wonder that such, compre- 

 hending for the first time this significant truth, have been swept off 

 their feet and carried to the opposite extreme — into a belief that mind 

 is all ? Once partial to medicine and ignorant of the mind and its 

 influence, they have gone to the opposite extreme, and are now 

 partial to mind and ignorant of medicine and its influence. Wrong 

 first and last, for the whole truth includes both of these half-truths. 

 There is mind and there is matter, and these instead of being antago- 

 nistic are complementary to each other, and, like the two sexes, are 

 fertile only when brought together. 



These different systems of mind-healing are but so many indications 



