ss or else we cannot begin to set in action the machinery for
curing it, even if that machinery be Christian Science itself, and we do
not change this rather stubborn fact by covering sickness with the blank
designation Error. Even the error is real for the time being.[56]

[Footnote 56: The writer once received an unexpected sidelight on the
practice of the Christian Science healer in this connection. He once
enjoyed the friendship of a Christian Science healer with whom he often
played golf. He called this healer up one morning to make an
appointment. His voice was not recognized over the telephone and he was
mistaken for a patient. The reply came back in professional tones--"And
what error are you suffering from this morning?" When he answered that
his own particular error was his persuasion that he could play golf the
telephone atmosphere was immediately changed.]

The results of fear are constantly dwelt upon and this too is in the
right direction. Much is made of the creative power of mind in that it
imparts purity, health and beauty (page 371). When Mrs. Eddy says on
page 373 that disease is expressed not so much by the lips as in the
functions of the body she is making one of those concessions to common
sense which she makes over and over again, but when she attempts to
explain how erroneous or--as one may venture to call it--diseased belief
expresses itself in bodily function one is reminded of Quimby.
Temperature, for example, is wholly mental. Mrs. Eddy's reason for
believing this is apparently because "the body when bereft of mortal
mind at first cools and afterward it is resolved into its primitive
mortal elements." "Mortal Mind produces animal heat and then expels it
through the abandonment of a belief or increases it to the point of
self-destruction" (page 374). Fever is a mental state. Destroy fear and
you end fever.

In all this there is a profound ignorance of the real causes of fever
which helps us to understand the marked deficiencies of the whole
system. There is nowhere any recognition of the body as an instrument
for the transformation and conservation and release of energy real as a
dynamo. There is nowhere any recognition of the commonplaces of modern
medical science in the tracing of germ infections. True enough, medical
science had hardly more than begun when "Science and Health" was first
written to redefine fevers in terms of germ infection and the consequent
disorganization of the balance