Part 21

There is no pathological phenomena more freely attested than the sudden vitiation of the secretions by intense mental disturbances. A mother subjected to intense fright, or fear, will have her milk become poisonous to her babe. Dr. A. Combe mentions an instance where a mother left her child to assist the father in combat with a drunken soldier. After the fight was over she nursed the babe, which was strong and healthy. After a few minutes it ceased nursing, and sank dead in its mother's arms. The milk had become a virulent poison.

A lady with a violent temper was warned by her physician against indulging it while nursing her babe, and she had obeyed until the child was several months old, strong and healthy. At that time she became enraged at some trivial circumstance, and soon afterwards she nursed her babe, which became ill, and within an hour was dead. The changes wrought in the saliva by anger are well known. The bite of an enraged man is as much to be dreaded as that of a mad dog. Blood poisoning is almost a sure consequence of inoculation with the saliva of an angry man or brute.

Hydrophobia itself is probably a spontaneous production in canines subjected to starvation and ill-usage.

Great joy or grief produces secretions in the blood, which make it poisonous. The prostration by grief is only equaled by that of violent disease. The blood and all secretions therefrom become so affected that a long time is required to eliminate the morbific matter from the system. If this is not accomplished, lingering illness or death is the final result. This is distinct from sudden death, on the disclosure of some startling news, of grief or joy. The heart in these instances suddenly fails at the nervous shock. Successful labor is always invigorating, while unsuccessful is depressing. It was observed in the early mining days of California that a stranger passing the claims could readily discover those that paid and those that did not, by the manners of the men who were working them. If unsuccessful, they were depressed, ill with fevers and idle. If successful they were at work early and late, cheerful, well, and energetic.

Every pursuit that ennobles and elevates the mind, tranquilizes the system, enhances the general health, and prolongs life.

Such is the wonderful sway the mind holds over the body. On the other hand, we find the body exciting a powerful influence on the mind; so intense and complete that leading physiologists believe that the latter is a result of, and entirely dependent on, the former, and having no existence independent thereof.

The microscope has poured a flood of light on disease. In most cases, as with these epidemics and contagions, a specific germ is introduced into the blood and multiplies, feeding on the vital fluid. If taken into the system of a saint it will, by multiplication, produce the disease, just as certainly as in the system of the vilest malefactor. There would be more reasonable grounds for hoping to drive a hungry tiger away by mind cure, than the myriads of microbes that swarm in a drop of the fever patient's blood, or the microbes in the lungs of a consumptive.

Then is the system of mental cure a sham? No! It claims too much. When millions of bacilli swarm in the lungs, or the micrococcus brings on fever, shall we say we are well, that the mind, as a part of God, can not be sick, and as the body is fathered by the mind it can not be? We may say this, but the inexorable logic of facts refute our opinions. We might as well attempt to stay the spring of the tiger by an effort of will.

But there is a consideration back of this. By the accumulation of an endless series of taints of body and of mind, by false ideas and views of life, the power of mind over the body can not be compared with what it would be in a perfect state of right living. This is a consideration of greatest value, for it shows us, not what the past has been, but what the future may be.

The limits of the power of the mind over the body are not known, but with knowledge it ever enlarges its boundaries. The class of diseases which may be regarded as essentially corporal, as the previously mentioned contagions produced by microbes, the effects of ptomaines, and the mineral and vegetable poisons, has its limits contracted by mental influences. Individuals in the most terrible contagions, although in contact with the sick and dying, physicians, nurses or companions, are often exempt. Their systems do not furnish the necessary conditions for growth of the disease germs. Such individuals are fearless; and it is said that their indifference to danger is their shield of protection; yet it is often the case that when they become exhausted by excessive care, they fall victims. This conclusion, however, may be safely drawn, that there are conditions of body or mind, or of both, invulnerable to disease. What these conditions are we may not now know, but it is possible to know.

In these cases of purely physical disease, the body reacts on the mind, and the giving way of the will is the first indication of the approach of the malady. It is folly to talk of the will overcoming a disease that has insidiously sapped its foundation. This is not saying that were the wrong conditions of living righted, and the taints of heredity eliminated, the power of the will would not be able to maintain the body against all succeeding influences. But to reach that perfect state will require many generations of rightly directed culture.

If grief, anger, or excessive joy are able to vitiate secretions, and cause sickness and death, a happy frame of mind, intellectual exertion and moral excellence tend to the perfect health of these secretions. Health is a condition to be gained and kept by careful observance of its laws, and these laws are of the physical as well as mental being.

Whatever truth there is in these newly named theories of healing, is identically the same as that claimed by the mesmerists and magnetists. The process, the cause and effect, are the same under the name of Christian Science as that of mesmerism. In the large class of diseases called nervous, the soothing influence of another mind is of unmeasured benefit. Even the hope aroused that some mind is exciting its will to relieve, is beneficial. The strengthened will and imagination are wonderfully healing agencies. While the influence of the mind over the body is admitted without contradiction so long as the former is connected with the latter, the limitations of the physical world must be felt. There is a sickness of the mind, and of the body, and over the latter the mind has not full control. Yet with a race freed from hereditary taint, having for generations obeyed the laws of health until its conditions are fixed by heredity, it may not be said what the power of the mind may be.

If the mother can stamp her unborn child with the monstrosity she fancies in her fright; if she can impart the insane thirst for stimulants and the fiendish hate and cruelty of savages, might she not by glorified conditions, exalted motives, and the over-shadowing consciousness that her mind is divine, the creator of an immortal being, endow the child with angelic qualities and make it a divine being? The children of many generations of such mothers, what exalted spiritual and intellectual attainment would be their inheritance!

Nor should the mother alone be held responsible, as has been the custom. Divine motherhood is linked with divine fatherhood, the opposite element, but of equal value. The germinal impulse carries with it all that has entered into the lives of remotest parental ancestors, and the recipient mother acts upon it, and is reacted on, until her entire being, physical and spiritual, is modified. However grand the ideal excellence of the future, it is not realized in the present, and may not be for ages to come. The present race of men are born with the sins of all the past stamped into their constitutions. It is folly to teach that there is no sickness except in the mind; idle to teach faith can cure disease, the seeds of which were planted unnumbered generations ago, and grown rankly from parent to child. Purity, true nobility of life, spiritual culture, devotion to right, and obedience to the laws of health may be accepted and the ideal attempted, but not fully realized now.

Meanwhile, old methods must not be wholly discarded. Old remedies can not be safely cast aside. The lame must have their staff and crutch until strong enough to walk alone.

CONCLUSION.--The Ideal may be sketched in our fond fancy, and the attempt to realize it began by living a higher, nobler, purer life. Know we what this means? It means more than simple living. There is everything beyond that. What this means will be best comprehended by referring to the preceding pages, where it is taught that there is a thought-atmosphere, from which sensitive minds receive a glorious flood of inspiration. Magnetism, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, or the states of healing by Faith or Christian Science are but the temporary approaches to that one condition of sensitiveness. In that condition great changes may be affected in the vital forces promotive of the normal functions of the various organs, as fear, grief, remorse, etc., may disturb their healthy action, and induce pathological changes in them.

Death will come to all physical forms sooner or later, for it is as necessary to the fulfillment of our destiny as to the transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly; but disease and all the sufferings, losses, and disappointments in its train, may be, and will be, eliminated, when mortal life is so ordered that it will constantly walk in the shadow of spiritual forces.

Then sickness will be regarded as a mark of ignorance, if not a crime.

What the Immortal State Must Be.

THE LEAD OF THE ARGUMENT.--In pursuing the study of the subjects presented in the preceding pages, the student often catches a glimpse of an intelligent force existing after the death of the physical being. This came through the facts presented by hypnotism, somnambulism, trance, clairvoyance, thought-transference, dreams, and the appearance of the deceased to near friends at a distance, at the time of, or soon after, the hour of dissolution.

The continuance of existence beyond the grave has been made to depend on belief in certain dogmas, or at least the condition of that life has been made thus dependent by the religious systems of the world. Now that science encroaches on the realm of faith, and these dogmas are questioned, and immortality which seemingly rests on and is supported by them, becomes doubtful; yet, if it be a fact that man has a spirit, which is immortal, this is the most over-shadowing fact in the universe; one of profoundest interest and most consonant with the desires of the human heart. Around it gather our fondest hopes and brightest dreams; by it the seeming disparity and injustice of this life are compensated; the tearful eye is dried; the broken heart finds balm, and the burdens of time and place cast aside, and the possibilities of the aspiring spirit may be realized. It is an unfailing staff in the hands of those who mourn the loved and lost, offering the only adequate consolation in the cruel hour when we stand by the couch of death, feeling that, beyond, darkness gathers thick and broods over a sea of eternal silence, from which only echo responds to our call of the name of the departed. Then it is that hope lifts our hearts from despair, and a positive assurance of the continuity of life is worth all else in the world.

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY HAS BEEN MADE A CURSE.--This belief, so full of delight and rainbowed with anticipations, has been made, from the dawn of man's religious nature, the means of inflicting unspeakable tortures, both of mind and body. Selfishness thrust the priest between man and the invisible world of spirit, and made immortality the instrument wherewith it could rule with diabolical despotism over mankind. Even when the rain-maker shook his rattling calabash at the sky, and beseeched the moisture-giving clouds to send down rain, the priestly order had fast hold on the superstitious savage; and in all the transformations of history, surging with the coming and going of countless generations and the ebb and flow of empires, never for a moment has this grip been loosened. The power of the temporal ruler has been second to that of the class who held the keys of life beyond the grave. What if the king could cast into a dungeon, condemn to the cross or the flames? That were pain for a moment, or, at most, for the few years of this life; and of what insignificance these short years, or the most terrible tortures human ingenuity could invent, to the infinite tortures extending through an eternal existence? Pharaoh might command Egypt to-day, but, to-night, his spirit would be summoned before the tribunal of the Dead; and those austere priestly judges would decide whether he be cast to the crocodiles of the Nile to become extinct, or again, clad in his mummified body, resurrected and purified, a companion of the gods.

What a position for an ignorant man! Immortality is the Promethean curse, enabling the vultures to inflict never-ending torments. The sweetest boon is oblivion, and that is denied. The sun may fade from the heavens and the stars cease to shine; but the spirit can not escape its doom, and will not have experienced even then the first pangs of its sufferings. Is it strange that men went wild with this dreadful belief? Ignorant men, who feared the unseen, intangible spirits of the air more than the accumulated tortures that human ruler might inflict, saw in the priests who claimed the power to control this intangible world, who held the keys of the Great Unseen, the only hope of escape. How well that order has seized its vantage, and, fanning the flames of superstition, stifled reason and led poor Humanity over the quaking bog-lands and reeking marshes of myth-theology!

This life is nothing compared with that which is to come. Its most innocent pleasures are sins; for the body itself is sinful, and by sin man came into the world. Pressed down beneath the weight of universal disaster, the doctrine of Jesus was the wail of despair. Take no heed of the morrow. Live only for to-day. Give all to the poor. Resist not the tyrant wrong. This life is a vale of tears, and the eye that weeps most shall be the brightest in glory in the life which is to come. O Jesus, on thy cross, what infinite misery has come from this misconception of thy teachings! Men, believing that their immortal spirits were chained to sinful bodies, rushed in herds to the mountain cave or lonely desert, and, by fasting and thirst, by hair-cloth garments wearing through the flesh to the bone, by flagellation and daily crucifixion, sought to expiate the sins of the body, and enter the next life purified.

Believing in an immortal life, they sought to force their belief on others, and proselyte by sword and torture. Dogmatism grew rankly luxuriant in this hot-bed of ignorance and superstition. Humanity was bound to the wheel; and ingenuity exhausted its skill in demoniacal inventions whereby severer pangs might be evoked, that through physical suffering the spirit might gain purification. Poor humanity might well exclaim, "Blessed be oblivion to this curse of Immortality!"

Not to lead a happy and perfect life, but to avoid the pangs of hell, to escape the consequences of original sin, was the object to which all energies were directed. And there was obligation to propagate this belief until received by all the world. Out of this doctrine came centuries of persecution, such as the heathen world never dreamed of. If your relative or friend accepted what you regarded erroneous dogmas, which would send him to eternal torment would it not be plain duty for you to use every means to persuade and convince him, even if necessary, by force? For should you, in last extremity, destroy his body, what fleeting consequence, if you saved thereby his soul!

The savage, having killed his enemy, trembles at the thought that the spirit has escaped, and may work untold mischief. He sits down at the cannibal feast, that, by eating the body, he may absorb the spirit, and thus be doubly avenged, by blotting out his foe, by making his body and spirit a part of himself.