, Christian science, mental science, etc., is a species of
delusion quite popular at the present time. Every era of the world has
cherished similar delusions, for the mass of the human race, even in
what are considered the educated classes, are so unfamiliar with the
processes of exact reasoning that they fall a ready prey to quacks of
all kinds. The fundamental idea of the mind cure system is that there
is no such thing as sickness. Disease, says one of their apostles, is
an error of the mind, the result of fear. Fear is only faith inverted
and perverted. God, who is all good Himself, and who made everything
good, cannot have been the author of any disease. As disease,
therefore, is not a creation, it has no existence, and when the healer
has succeeded in impressing this fact upon the mind of the patient, the
cure is effected. It is curious to note into what utter absurdities the
need for consistency carries these apostles. Poisons, they say, would
be quite harmless if the fear of them was removed, but we have yet to
find the "mental science" teacher who will undertake to prove this by
herself taking liberal doses of aconite and strychnine. The illnesses
of children are explained by the hypothesis of hereditary fear. The
majority of the teachers of this new faith are women, many of whom, no
doubt, are sincere in their belief; but it may be safely stated that
the men engaged as the so-called physicians of the new practice are,
with few exceptions, unprincipled quacks, who have gone into the
business for the money they can make by duping the ignorant. As far as
there is any truth underlying the vagaries of mind cures, and their
boasts of remarkable cases of healing, it may be admitted that the mind
has much influence over the body. This fact has been recognized by
intelligent physicians for centuries. And that the peculiar modern type
of nervous diseases, which are so largely caused by excessive stimulus
of the nerves and the imagination, should be amendable to cure through
the imagination, is not strange. It will be noted that this mental cure
has effected its miracles mainly among women, where it has the
emotional temperament to work on, and almost wholly in the ranks of the
wealthy and well-to-do, where there is little or no impoverishment of
the system by insufficient food and excessive toil to hinder its
effects. We have not heard, nor are we likely to hear, of an epidemic
disease checked by the mind cure, or of the h