liar variety of mind-cure upon
Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its
extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to
cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's
fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that
the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man
could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if
he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection,
etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula,
fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or
inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would
produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the
brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately
connected with mind than is the brain."

Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous
system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain
or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief
bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is
mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear.
"You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible,
for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your
belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this
belief a boil."

Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the
rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation
belongs to matter."[11]

Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think
they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter.
Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but
Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of
their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have
taught him to have epizooetic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the
lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no
fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would
suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree
which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."

All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in
their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart fro