ive suggestion (and felt it
through all my being): 'There is nothing but God, and all life comes
from him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take
care of it.' Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two
miles that day."

The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but
also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made
such account.

"I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not been
gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling increased
rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness,
headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an attack of
influenza. I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic
then in Boston, or something worse. The mind-cure teachings that I had
been listening to all the winter thereupon came into my mind, and I
thought that here was an opportunity to test myself. On my way home I
met a friend, I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt.
That was the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my
husband wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would
rather wait until morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the
most beautiful experiences of my life.

"I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie down
in the stream of life and let it flow over me.' I gave up all fear of
any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was
no intellectual effort, or train of thought.

My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me
even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all would be well,
that all WAS well. The creative life was flowing into me every
instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and
full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my
mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or
persons; but only of love and happiness and faith.

"I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but
when I woke up in the morning, I WAS WELL."

These are exceedingly trivial instances,[64] but in them, if we have
anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification.
For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you
consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or
not. That they seemed to THEMSELVES to have been cured by the
exper