VARIOUS DISEASES WHICH AFFLICT HUMANITY AT THE PRESENT DAY_.

The rude nations of the earth believed that disease was the result of
evil spiritual agencies, and the untutored savage, without the aid of
books or any of the advantages which the learned physician possesses of
studying the human system, arrived at the conclusion that disease was
inflicted by living, unseen individualities.

Science has discarded that idea. It has dissected the human body, and,
finding the result of the diseases, has assumed to have found the cause;
assumed that it is mere bodily disarrangement. Yet any intelligent
physician will tell you that in his own experience he has witnessed the
effect of mind upon the body; that he can give a bread pill to a patient,
informing him that it is a purgative, and it will act in that manner;
that a certain powder will create nausea or a burning sensation, and it
will produce those results when the powder itself is harmless.

As the body, if permitted to decay, comes to be infested with vermin, so
the spirit, if allowed to remain idle and inactive, will become infested
by spiritual vermin which will taint and destroy it; and the savage idea
that disease is caused by spiritual agency is correct.

If an individual permit any one idea to obtain predominance, and he dwell
upon that idea to the exclusion of other thoughts, he will attract
spirits who fill the air--not organized spiritual beings who inhabit the
spirit world, but half-organized beings (polypus) who live in this
atmosphere and were originated from the brains and the physical organisms
of the inhabitants of the earth; these beings, finding his mind
concentrated or magnetized to a point, will effect an entrance. Suppose,
for instance the person centres his mind upon the loss of a friend or of
money: this concentration becomes a magnet, which, like the rays of
sunlight acting upon a portion of vegetation, produces decomposition upon
which spirit vermin may feed. So by dwelling too continuously upon one
thought, certain faculties of the mind become excited by constant action,
while others become paralyzed and the result is insanity.

Now spiritualists, or believers in spirit intercourse, should be the most
healthy persons in the community, for they understand, or should
understand, the laws of psychology which teach that constant dwelling
upon one thought will bring spirits of like character who will intensify
that thought, and they also know tha