The seventh separate statement of Moses is, “Let the earth bring forth.” Earth here means mind. Let the mind bring forth. What can mind bring forth except thoughts? But Moses is talking entirely of the Divine Mind in man. It is not acknowledged by us as the only Mind and thus is hidden entirely. Hide it not. That is letting it bring forth.
Immediately we uncover the Divine Mind in man, it shows action in making fresh life in everybody and everything we meet. It brings out their original health. It strengthens them wonderfully. It brings provisions and bounty to them. It brings them defense and protection from accidents, from trouble, from afflictions. But all its ministry is only showing more and more nearly what is already worked out in Spirit. Remember this: Even healing is not healing, because Mind needs no healing. Our saying that Mind is given its freedom is also a. statement of appearance only. For as God is free, so Mind is free.
Moses is using a figure of speech entirely in saying, “Let mind do thus and so” — for the Spirit, which is God, which is Mind, has its own way entirely. We are to see Spirit. We can see Spirit. And the more of Spirit we see the more perfectly we see things.
The man appears sick to you because you see him that way. If you let your Spirit tell what it sees there will be no talk about sickness, no discussion of what is distressing anybody. All things are waiting to be looked upon by us as they really are.
Did you ever notice how you feel that the one who realizes your worthiness seems to understand you best?
Take the old Lord Fauntleroy as an example. Little Lord Fauntleroy thought he was generous and good. He really believed it. He praised his old grandfather. Everybody else condemned him. Consequently the grandfather would say, “Ask little Lord Fauntleroy. He knows me, he will tell you what I will do.” Now, even if the old Lord Fauntleroy had appeared to all other people to be savage and ugly, his soul was generous and good. The little child saw the soul. He could see nothing else. This is true of everybody and everything. They feel that in Truth they are Good. So they who see them as good, please them best. Here is where it probably seems impossible to you. You think that the beastly characters we read of must not be called good. You see very plainly the faults of those you meet every day, and it is impossible for you to call them good.
Moses and Jesus teach the same story. Let it be of the soul you speak. Let Spirit utter itself. The evil disposition, the greed, the appetite of mankind, is all unreality. It signifies how far we are from seeing spiritual Truth when we see evil. You can see for yourself that if God the Good is omnipresent, then that which is not good is not present.
It is a tenet of the most ancient religions that what seems external exists not at all. And wherever we find profound thought and feeling, we find men thinking the same way of outward and external things. Nothing exists outside ourselves, as to what seems outside. When we realize God we are sure to say we feel God. The realization is within ourselves. We have supreme power over and with our realizations.
All realizations of Good externalize in good. We train our realizations first. Then, as phenomena or the world that folds us round comes second, we deal with our world secondly. In this Science, there are six lessons devoted to the Self Mind alone, that is, devoted to the realization of God in the soul. And there are six lessons devoted to our relations to the world.
There is no religion which has not, in one way or another, taught that “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and, “By thy words thou art justified.” The words we speak and the thoughts we think constitute our breath of mind, as the air constitutes the breath of nostrils and lungs. There are words which exhilarate the mind, as there are airs which exhilarate the body.
The Japanese believe that praise of all things will exhilarate first the mind and then the body. A young man in Japan, named Kurozumi Saki, in 1814, became very gloomy through complaining. Complaining and praising are two separate processes. They bring very different results. He had breathed in the spirit of gloom till he was in deep-seated consumption. Their theological term for gloom is “Inki.” He suddenly resolved to cease mourning. It was hard for him not to complain at first, but he was one who could hold to whatever he had made up his mind to do, and he began to praise everything and everybody. He went on for some years, breathing into himself an entirely different set of words. He began to be very cheerful. His consumption kept growing worse, but he did not heed it. He kept on praising everything he thought of. One night, just as he supposed he was breathing his last, but while he was praising the early rising sun, a sort of buoyant ecstasy seized him. His breath grew deep and electrifying. He straightened himself up from the ground, where he was prostrated on his face, and found that he had breathed into himself the elixir vitae, the vital breath of health. The Japanese call it “yoki,” the spirit of cheer. He was more than well. He was buoyantly quickened. His very breath was a healing vitality, if he breathed on deformed or dying people. His fame spread abroad into all lands. He was a miracle worker.
There is an elixir in the words of Truth. Keep them going continually. They will change your entire life and change your powers. You are a miracle worker by inherent right. Give your soul the chance to do all your thinking, all your speaking.
A young man had a cancer in his nose, which had gone so far that there was no material remedy. He betook himself to prayer. There is always God waiting for us to depend upon when we come to where we find that nobody and nothing else can help us. He had prayed and prayed and still no signs of healing, when he suddenly felt the cheerful elixir of his Spirit breaking through him, and he was healed.
In the Bible we read, “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they shall be alike good.” Again we read, “Let us be not weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”
Agassiz was a great student of nature. He felt that there were secret springs within all forms which he would like to understand. When he did, it would seem miraculous how some other new points of interest would come up to lead him on. It is the very way the Spirit of God works with us, if we set out to make ourselves one with it.
A young Catholic priest in Germany, about two hundred years ago, was so buoyant and cheerful in spirit that when he spoke in a loud and authoritative tone of voice to a sick man’s disorder to disappear, and commanded health to appear, they obeyed him almost instantaneously. He would wet his finger on his tongue and make the sign of the cross over the sickness. The saliva on his finger was a symbol of erasure. The up and down stroke of the cross means that nothing has any evil power. The right and left stroke of the cross symbolizes that the Good now reigns. If they did not get cured at his first order, they did at the second or third. He was persistent to his own ideas. The howlings of the people did not disturb him. He lived his own life alone with the Spirit.
Why should you say that God has afflicted you, if saying such a thing makes your breath a disease breeder? Why should you say that you feel unhappy, if saying this shuts up a gate against the breath of the spirit of the morning of joy? Are you not a chooser of the thoughts you shall think? Have an hour in the morning for some special message to the world, or about yourself. Have an hour in the afternoon for some words of Truth to the world. These words will come to fruitage. No matter if you have a special tendency to some grief, or your way is lonely and hard, tell the way of the Spirit so often that she comes stealing through you and you become a health giver and a cheer bringer.
Sometimes you may find yourself seeming to be sick. Nothing has happened to you, yet you are sick. You have caught some of the world’s false beliefs in your thought. Maybe they are old notions you used to think which are just showing themselves. No disease comes from material causes, although we say so when we talk as the world talks. All is in thought first. This Science deals with the thoughts, just as Jesus did, and then it speaks of externals.
Learn to get exactly right ideas, and you will after awhile educate the world by just thinking Science. You do not have to tell a man that he has no disease, that he never took a chill, etc., when every bit of him is sure that he had been in a draft and that he has influenza. You treat him silently. You need not talk all the time about any point in Science, but you may know the Truth. Jesus said, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.”
A very strong mental healer was afraid of damp drafts before she was in the Science. She was already past sixty years of age, according to symbolic reckoning, and she kept taking apparent colds whenever a damp draft struck her. She was sensible enough not to say a word in the presence of a draft, except in her mind, for her words had not power apparently to annul drafts. After awhile her mental feeling got so strong that drafts never affected her.
Do you think that it was primarily the draft which gave her the sign of hoarseness so often? No, it was the fear of certain people. She had always been the kind of mind that has someone it fears all the time. Certain people always have something that they are fearful of. Look them squarely in the eye of their mental face and you can trace it every time to the fear of some person.
It is well, said Jesus, to agree with your adversary quickly. That is, while you are alone with yourself, take up that man or woman and settle the question decidedly that you are not afraid of them. They cannot enter the sphere of life where you dwell. Your thoughts push their evil down and leave the Holy Spirit of them free to do you great good. Much of material misfortune can be traced to dread or fear of people’s influence or opposition. You may lead your own free life in mind, and it will unconsciously rebuff every hurt. The hurts may at first seem real, but as the mind puts out its wings stronger it blows even the memory of evil away as a chaff. You rise out of the reach of the things that frighten you. You forget the feelings of repugnance. You drop even the memory of the things that brought it on.
Sometimes the way to meet hardships that have clung to us for years is not by saying that they are nothing at all. It is by stopping and finding the Holy Spirit of them. A young Scientist had a bronchial affection which never yielded at all to calling it nothing, though other parts of her body had quickly healed through telling them that nothing could ail them. One night she faced up the hoarseness which had kept her whispering instead of speaking for about three months. She said, “You seem to stay around me as if you had nowhere else to go and belonged here. Now I feel that you have some good mission to me. God sends me a message by you, and I have been snubbing you and treating you badly. I will do so no more. As God, with good for me in your presence, I bid you welcome in love. You may stay with me as long as you please.” In the morning the cure was wrought. She found out that it was true that it was a message of goodness for her, for her gloom of mind had left her. She touched the same principle which the Japanese worked upon so many years, viz., rejoicing in the things instead of mourning about them.
If I were to be asked directly as to the quickest way for a Scientist to get his healing power going, I would probably say, “Praise everything and everyone in your mind, and as far as your mental convictions will demonstrate promptly, speak these praises aloud.” If it should be through fear that you did not speak audibly about things, you must redouble your thoughts, and speak a few times to your seeming discredit. If you are timid about telling people that they are well NOW, I would advise you to run the risk of your pride of name a few times, and say, like a Denver doctor, “I do not care if you do seem to be sick, I don’t believe in sickness, and I think this is all imagination. You must be sitting up by the end of an hour and well by tomorrow.” It is different with different states of mind, however.
Your timidity is often because you are afraid it will not come out right, and people will think you are foolish, and tell others so. Can you not trust your reputation in the hands of Truth? Which do you suppose had the larger practice, the cheerful, buoyant doctor who always told his patients that they would get well, or those who tried to be sensible and judge by appearances? Why, it was the one who told everybody that he would get well, whether or no, and laughed cheerfully. His presence to cheer was an elixir for the family, and they sent out their cheerful feelings and buoyed up the sick man’s mind, and he caught the vitalizing sparks of electric cheerfulness. You must break over the bounds you have put upon yourself sometimes.
But again, so much of denial of the patient’s seeming malady is talked out like an intellectual problem that patients do not catch healing, they catch fear. Perfect love of your Science takes away your fear, and after a while you do not talk Science much, you heal by some hearty, simple, cheerful word, that bubbles over from constant thoughts of health and life, irresistible spiritual vigor, and unhidden goodness in everyone.
There was one doctor who, it was reported, laughed his patients well. Everything they said and did amused him so that he laughed uproariously. Patients would get to laughing in spite of themselves. He would sit and roll up bread pills, or anything else that came handy, and tell the patient that he was more scared than hurt, that he was resting up a little and would be all right soon. He took many a seemingly dying man and laughed him back to life. Change the groove of the patient’s mind.
Doctor Abercrombie went to visit an old schoolmate, and found her seemingly breathing her last. “Do you remember the crow’s nest?” he asked her, in his buoyant, boyish tone of voice. She smiled. He said something more. Not as if he were urging or coaxing her to think of old school days, but as if they were something to remember. It brought back to her fainting mind the memory of her springing, happy girlhood, when the birds sang in the summer trees, and the boys and girls played and laughed in the orchards. That change of mind cured her.
A great healer once said that he always kept his mind dwelling on the enchanting airs of summertime. He remembered how the chirp of grasshoppers and the far away song of birds and brooks sounded. Then he would feel the soft flakes of health. There is a faculty of your health whereby it loves to drop down into your mind and distill like the dew through your flesh.
Thus God has chosen the weak things of this world to confound the mighty. But you do not have to watch anything or anyone for your health. God is health. Ever present with us is God, the health of the universe. You need not depend upon any physician or friend for your strength and courage. God is Strength.
“Though all around thee courage fail,
Do thou be strong.
Though all around thee doubt prevail,
In faith move on.”
It is the dependence upon outside help, or even what seems to be outside help, which the Truth takes away. We learn to see God in the sick man as health, because we know that as health God is there. We learn to see strength in the feeble man because God as strength is there. Our strength rises and goes forward to mankind, because we know that our strength is God. It goes forth just by our knowing that it is so. Tremendous strength is tremendous health. Thus John the Revelator calls the effect of certain denials “beasts”, which is a word for strength. There is an atmosphere of uplifting about one who knows he is strong in Spirit. He realizes that his soul is always rising on the wings of aspiration above the conditions of his lot. You may breathe strength itself by talking to strength itself. The Holy Spirit is strength. God has given to the Holy Spirit all the strength of the universe. If you praise the Holy Spirit for this strength you will be surprised how it will take hold of you. Some morning or some eventime its energy will thrill you.
You will not find any timidity about telling patients how the snow flakes of healing are falling around them all the time, if your heart is sure of it; but you will be wise enough not to speak of such seemingly impossible process if your heart is full of certainty, for you will see that your presence is all the speech they need.
Do you think you must say something audibly or mentally to sick people? Bind no burdens of necessity around your neck. If you have awakened in the early morning with right thoughts for the day, just keep still when your first case comes in, or when you see her or him. “Wait on the Lord.” “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” “Stand aside in the battle and let the warrior within thee fight.” “Wait, I say, on the Lord.”
There was a young practitioner who had spoken mighty praises in the morning of the way God, as the health and salvation of the people, would work through her to will and to do. She was not as yet a successful healer and it troubled her. She meekly acknowledged that God was doing great things for her and through her and by her, even though she had not seen it so. Her first case that morning was a lame man. She felt divine compassion for him, but had no thoughts, for she felt that if God did not manifest through her she could not make Him do so. And this held her silent, almost helpless, as if she were nothing at all and God were all. All at once, quite unexpectedly to herself, she told him to throw down his crutch and try to walk across the room. He obeyed at once. He found that he could limp without his crutch very well. She had him try two or three times more and he was cured. It seemed as if his flesh and muscles drank in the elixir of a new mental atmosphere. Very likely he was thirsty for the waters of the refreshing God presence, with nobody’s thought to interfere with him. (Lameness is a pretty sure sign of a mind interfered with). This little woman made herself so silent that the voice of the Spirit could speak to the waiting soul of the man.
There are ways of thinking about your environment which will make you like a harp in the fingers of love, so enchanting will be your silent mind to the world-hurt traveler, so blessed will sound your voice to the bruised child of human hardships. You need not worry about whether you shall speak or not. You will have your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel if you take the fresh morning for giving thanks and glad praises unto the Spirit, and speak forth with freedom some lesson of Science.
In the Science there is really no need of studying the symbolic language of Moses, as we have done. We know these great principles without going back over the ages to past men’s thoughts. But we are inclined to look through the files of thoughts which have run through men’s minds and made them famous or made them miracle workers. Moses was a miracle worker. What idea did he hold which made him work miracles? The mind of the man is expressed in his writings. This is true of all miracle workers. If they spoke aloud words, what did they say? Their healing power was God. God with them, in them, through them, is the same God of whom we seek to get the high healing knowledge. There is a secret of healing. The method of it is nothing.
The Japanese breathed upon his patients and they were healed. The German priest made the sign of the cross and cried with a loud voice, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, let the devil appear.” He meant the disease. It was his expression for evil. He wished the evil to show itself plainly that it might get out of the way entirely at his order. Then he made the sign of the cross in the air, and again he cried with a loud voice, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, let the disease be gone.” Then to the patient he would say, “From this time forth be healed.” In our time we find some people healing by one means and some by another. Whenever they begin to acknowledge that God is the health of the people you will find them using less and less material helps toward healing each other. Yet you must be sure that whatever health is brought to mankind it all comes from God.
Material methods are apt to turn the mind away from remembering that it is from God that all health comes. So, practitioners have resorted to thinking out great reasonings about God’s presence as a healing presence, and the results have come out in good health and invigorated life with as sure certainty as by any other method. The more spiritual the feeling the practitioner has while healing the patient, the more certain is permanent cure.
There is something about reasoning about the presence of God, and telling about the character of God, which makes the cure affect other needs of the patients besides bodily disease. They are often turned from their old habits. Very often they become attentive to divine ideas and entirely change their tastes.
Scientists become very particular about leaning on the word of God alone in curing sick people. Zoroastrianism, a religion older than Brahminism or Buddhism, has for one of its principles that one may heal by herbs, another by the will, but it is by the divine word that the sick are most surely healed. The practice of healing by the word lets us most quickly into the secret of healing. But, it is no more the words that heal than it is the herbs, for if it were the words themselves one would heal by using them as well as another. We all know that one may use the words faithfully and not cure the case, while another may use the same words and cure the case in a few minutes.
This has led students to talk of faith in words as the healing power of mind. But if words do not cure unless we have faith in them, faith is the curative principle and words are nothing. It is the same as urging us to have confidence in nothing at all to tell us we must have faith in words to make them work, for words without faith are nothing at all. That is no way to instruct mind. It is running it around in the same circle with herbs for its weapons or words for its weapons. Either one must have faith in them to accomplish anything. If you examine it closely you will see that healing is brought to pass by faith in health. The good practitioner has his mind fixed definitely on something which to him is Good. It comes right through the appearance of evil by his mind being fixed on it. All his words about health just express his feelings as nearly as possible. The more perfectly his words express his feelings, though he is only thinking silently, the more real the health of his patient seems to him. Thus you see it is not words that heal, yet it is while words are being spoken that the feelings go forth as on highways and touch the sick. Yet it is not feelings that heal, for people often feel strongly that their patients are cured and they are not cured.
There is a secret spring to the healing practice that has never been taught, except this Science by its reasoning will keep touching it with each one of its lessons. By going over and over the lessons we come nearer the healing feeling. There is not a practitioner of the Science cure who has struck the spring with the touch of such perfect understanding that he works out his cures as accurately and surely as a mathematician works out his problems. Old age, palsy, rheumatism, grief, poverty, overtake them, and they have their match, for they have not beaten their own particular adversary.
The healing Science is Like an unexplored and undescribed territory. Columbus discovered America and brought it to the notice of the civilized world so practically that others coming after him could describe it exactly. The healing lands have been discovered for ages, but there are only twelve pieces of information given concerning them.
Nobody could tell what was to be the secret of prosperity in the new world discovered by Columbus. But today we know the secret of American prosperity is its plenteous gold, coal-beds, gas wells, timberlands, grain lands, reliable climate, its river courses, its building stone, silver deposits, pasturage, salt wells all on a material basis, but the foundation for material opportunities. The enterprise and efforts of men in Europe and Africa had nothing to encourage them, but in America they had all. Yet for ages America lay unknown, though possibilities were within her borders. Norway keeps her records of one who discovered America long before Columbus, but he made no lasting impression in the minds of his contemporaries. He brought home no marvelous products to substantiate his reports.
So in this healing practice we have had many a thinker touching on its enchanting borders, but only Jesus who could prove His words. We need therefore to believe most in Him who proved most. Wherever we are found disagreeing with Him we will simply take His word on the subject and keep it as Truth. If we are inclined to speak slightingly of any practice of healing, we will remember that He condemned none, because the secret of healing was known to Him. His coat would heal whoever touched it. But do you think the coat, before He charged it with healing, had any curative energy in it? His words would heal the instant He sent them out, but those who knew Him best used those words and failed. The word He consecrated to healing must even now be charged with the same Spirit He felt. How shall we get His Spirit? How shall we use the omnipotent Principle He set before us? How shall we absolutely understand how to heal the sick? Paul said that by letting the same Mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. He exactly agrees with Moses. Let the Christ Mind speak its way through us.
Now the Christ Mind thinketh no evil, is not puffed up, is not angry, is not vain, is not critical, is full of praise. Here again we come by another line of thinking right upon the same idea of praise which has made so many healers successful. Also I will call your attention to the fact that after a short time vain or critical or proud thoughts seem to stop the healing power of those who at one time were quite strong workers. The vain mind does not feel praiseful toward others. This state of mind has no praiseful feeling toward even God. So we make a practice of praising everybody and everything, and above all giving daily thanks that God has done such wonderful things for us in Spirit. We take the twelve statements of Science and sanctify the day with two of them particularly each day. Through such practice the secret of healing is coming to be an open secret. We feel it becoming more and more the inheritance of the world.
Once a practitioner, who had a woman come asking to be cured of catarrh, put down her head, and silently let the Spirit speak through her as I just told you. Then she waited a moment, and to the woman she said, “I pronounce you free from the thoughts of other people. You think your own noble thoughts. You are free, whole, cleansed, and good. You are healed! In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I pronounce you well and strong and at peace through and through.” The woman was instantly healed when these words were silently spoken.
As we all have a right to be free within our own Spirit, and as we all are indeed free within our own Spirit, this is a Truth that everyone who has gotten into the habit of unconsciously yielding to the race belief of one kind and another, is eager to receive. He will be healed at once. If not, you must treat him over again in the same way, the same hour he is with you. If not then, give him the same treatment again. Three times are not too many to give one message. If he comes another day complaining of the same thing, you must change your treatment, but I will speak of that in the next lesson.
If you have a practice of saying, every Monday afternoon, “I as Spirit do not accuse the world or myself of lustful passions or sensual desires; all is good in living demonstration before me,” you will heal people before they come to you, and after a while you will never see any sick people. But you are to handle each case faithfully which does come to you.
There are moments when your healing power will be wonderful. When those moments are gone you may feel mournful, but you must not mourn even about that, for you are to be cheerful under all circumstances. Cheerfulness is a praiseful feeling. It always indicates that the healing power is acting through you. The cheerfulness may rise into ecstasy. Then it is instantaneous healing.
Will you now, each one of you, if you can think of someone you believe has a chronic ailment like deafness, or curvature, call the name now. Then put down your head with me, and let the Spirit within you say now:
It was not I that accused the world or myself of lustful passions or sensual appetites. I do not believe in the chronic ailments you say you are afflicted with. I do not believe in sickness, because I have never accused the race of living a life outside of Spirit, or different from Spirit. I believe in health in and for and through everybody now and forever. I believe in you as the perfect man of God.
Now speak again the name of the person you are thinking about, then speak it again, for there is something in a name that strikes down into the very soul of the Spirit, the deep mind and heart. This is the way of a regular formula which we will now use:
You are not afflicted with any kind of disease. You are Spirit. The Spirit knows nothing of imperfection. The Spirit shines through all your being with its clear, holy light.
From first to last, in your real life, no error has fastened upon you, therefore there is no disease or imperfection in you.
You were not born of flesh, according to the law of the flesh, but of Spirit according to the law of the Spirit.
The lustful passions and sensual appetites of the generations back of you have not descended upon you in disease.
God is your Father and Mother. You have not inherited disease.
The race mind has not touched you with thoughts of lustful passions and sensual appetites, therefore disease does not touch you. God enfolds you round about.
People with whom you are associated do not burden you with their thoughts of the senses. You are not subject to the thoughts or feelings of others, therefore you cannot have disease in your mind.
Your own thoughts of things of matter, as to lustful passions and sensual appetites, have no power in them to give you disease. You are free from your own passions and appetites in the Spirit, therefore you are cleansed by spiritual thoughts now and are well.
My thoughts do not burden you. You are free of my error. You are free in the Spirit.
You are free from all thoughts of disease. God is your life. You cannot be threatened with death of any part of your life, nor fear death, nor yield to death of any part of your life forever.
God is your health. You cannot be threatened with disease in any part of your health, nor fear disease, nor yield to disease in any part of your body forever. God is your strength. You cannot be threatened with weakness, nor fear weakness, nor yield to weakness in your strength forever.
God is your substance. Your health is God in every part of your body.
You are ready to acknowledge to all and to yourself that you are healed. You are in harmony with your life in every way.
I now realize that you are healed. I praise you for your life in the Spirit. I praise you for your strength in the Spirit. I praise you for your perfect manifestation of God NOW! Amen.
There is in reality no disease or imperfection whatever. When you realize this strongly I hope you will not treat anyone, for this realization is itself a treatment. We will give a treatment to this same case after the next lesson. And so much as you remember you can give twice before the next lesson.
You will notice that we have made one denial. It is the first to be made against disease. We do not deny to destroy anything, but because denial of evil is omnipotent Truth.