Page:Science and Health.djvu/376

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372
SCIENCE AND HEALTH.

ing these terrible results was our occasion for learning their cause, or discovering this mal-practice, and our students are well aware we have no difficulty in tracing the mental cause of disease. But before we discovered this mal-practice and its motives, the evil had reached so far, and held such sway over the patient's minds, when we informed one she was not recovering and had better return home, she answered with indignation, “My doctor says I am recovering,” but died before she reached her earthly home. Wholly unconscious of his secret method of turning the minds of those he manipulated, against his benefactor, or of its effects on their bodies, the patients asked us if the doctor had lost his power, not understanding it was his loss of Truth, and the hidden evil of his course that injured the patients. A student of science cannot practice mesmerism honestly, therefore successfully, as a Newton, who knows no higher method of healing. But the mal-practice we allude to was more terrible than simply a change to mesmerism; it chose darkness rather than light because its deeds were evil. Such a practitioner putting aside our moral precepts retains that portion only of our teachings which relates to the patient's belief of disease and the method of destroying this belief by the doctor's opposite, verbal, and mental argument. This is the very least of the science of being, and yet the only part the mal-practitioner can avail himself of to heal the sick. The patients have no recognition of how much error he may also mingle with this argument of Truth that will affect their minds and bodies together, and to bad results as well as good. If the sick recover from the effects of the doctor's mental