Page:Science and Health.djvu/379

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HEALING THE SICK.
375

heads of his patients, communing with them mentally as he does this, but instead of speaking to them only Truth, and that which promotes harmony, he takes this opportunity to introduce into their minds side-issues, such as suit his sinister purpose, imparting his own likes and dislikes to the patients, either from vengeance or ambition. If the doctor helps the patients through head-rubbing, it is through their belief he does it, and mind is controlled either with Truth or error. And a bad effect can as certainly follow this practice as a good one, but the patients are wholly unconscious of this, or how it is produced. If he has imparted error he certainly will deny it, but if he had not done this we should never have learned what this mal-practice was. Through an erroneous influence on their minds the patients are made, in a day, worse physically, while to him whom they owe this state, even the author of it, all unconsciously they turn to be healed. We have learned this mal-practice is impossible in science, and is mesmerism demoralized. Had it been possible for us to control mind through this subtle, criminal agency, we could not have been tempted to do it, even in self-defence; the temptation, even, could not reach us, and we resorted to our pen to expose this evil that reached, for the first time, our apprehension.

Some newspaper articles falsifying the science, calling it mesmerism, etc., but especially intended, as the writer informed us, to injure its author, precipitated our examination of mesmerism in contradistinction to our metaphysical science of healing based on the science of Life. Filled with revenge and evil passions, the mal-practitioner can only depend on manipulation, and rubs