While there is a Principle of Health and none of disease, there are conditions and appearances of, and opinions and beliefs regarding both health and disease. Principles cannot be changed, nor would any change in Principle be of the shghtest benefit to any one. All Principles are beneficent in their quality and beneficial in their character. But conditions may be changed, and it is desirable and of advantage to transform all conditions of disease into those of health.

Conditions of disease are founded on erroneous interpretations and false ideas, and these are their sole support. Take away their bases and sources of power, withdraw their continued nourishment, and their vitality will be impaired and they will begin to fade away. All results are proportioned to their causes, and most conditions of disease will begin to pass away and continue to do so as their causes are removed.

However, the character of some conditions is such that they are slow to disappear even when their causes have been removed. No belief is destroyed in the sense of being completely obliterated. Nothing is ever lost entirely ; but one overcomes a particular belief through transmuting it into another, which then constitutes a new cause. When one first bases his knowledge on Principle, he substitutes this for his previous false beliefs or opinions of appearance, and an attitude of construction displaces that of destruction. Man acquires his knowledge, both because of his physical senses, and also in spite of
them. But they are essentials, and their misinterpretations are a necessary factor in man's evolutionary development. So with disease. Everything has its use and purpose and that use and purpose is for one's benefit.

Whatever comes to one is his that he may extract from it the lesson it has for him. That accomplished, he should drop it and let it go, graduate from it and forget it. Its purpose having been accomplished, its continuance stands in his way. One can be grateful that it came to him, grateful that he has learnt its lesson, and grateful that it is going or has gone. This is a Universe of use and purpose, and the extent of one's understanding of this fact is a test of his wisdom. When one's thought is based on Principle, he is thinking with the Universal Thought, and is in harmony with Perfect Health. When one's thought is based on his opinion of appearance or belief in sensation, it lacks this essential foundation. Irrespective of what his opinion or belief may be, if it is not founded in Principle it is subject to change at any moment, and is lacking in permanence.

Like pictures thrown on a screen and kept there for some time, one's opinions or beliefs may seem to be permanent but they are really subject to change without notice.

It is well that opinions and beliefs should be the stepping-stones to knowledge. Those who do not take the steps necessary to the attainment of knowledge are left behind as incompetents, while the others lead the way to a deeper understanding. Knowledge does not dispense with appearance or sensation, but it interprets these with understanding. Knowledge represents the co-operation of thought with understanding rather than with opinion. One can know the Good only ; he can have but an opinion of evil.

When one is sorrowful, hating, angry, melancholy or otherwise negatively emotional, it is because he has misinterpreted sensation or appearance. The realisation of Principle will have no such effect. When this misinterpretation has become contagious and there is a general disposition to sense conditions as destructive — as when there is widespread fear of physical danger, hunger, financial loss, etc. — an epidemic may ensue when the disease will take form in correspondence with the false thinking. With fear of such an epidemic prevailing, the sight of its prescribed symptoms will often frighten one
into this disease.

The solution of many a stupendous problem may be formulated in but a few words, as the greatest truths may be expressed with the utmost simplicity. Between the statement of Principle and the living of it many years may elapse, not to mention lives and centuries. But an ideal is a magnet that draws one onward and upward, and the realisation of Truth is the road to freedom. In Principle, the cure of disease is as simple as its cause.

That which stands pre-eminently in the way of a cure of disease is the tenacity with which one clings to habits, one's unwillingness to change his mode of thinking, one's difficulty in taking a new attitude of mind toward the world in which he lives. This indisposition arises from man's fundamental conservatism, and his natural indisposition to admit his mistakes. Although habits are of one's own making, many willingly accept slavery to them and render it extremely difficult to regain their freedom. One possesses a faith in that which he has already made part of himself, perhaps after much testing and proving, and he has a corresponding fear of that which is novel and as yet foreign to him.

Fundamentally, it is fear that stands in the way of curing disease. Fear is the greatest factor in the cause of disease, and the removal of fear is the first step in its cure. But fear cannot be removed by cutting it out as though it were a physical form. Fear is a mental result of misinterpretation of one's relation to Truth. It lessens as one interprets more truly, and it is transmuted into courage and faith when one interprets rightly in the light of Principle.

The first step in the cure of disease is to eliminate the factor of fear. The change from one's false opinion or belief through a more intelligent understanding may accomplish this ; and it will always follow that realisation of Principle which substitutes a constructive understanding which is fundamentally spiritual, in the place of the former destructive influence which is more distinctly mental. One cannot escape from fear while continuing in the beliefs or opinions that inspired fear. One cannot avoid the traditional fears inherited from his ancestors while clinging to their fearsome beliefs. All that health calls one to relinquish is falsity ; all that it requires is the co-operation with Truth. It would seem to be evident that no one may secure health by grasping more tightly the errors that have created his disease.

Among our inherited falsities are the beliefs that our dual interpretation of appearance and sensation as good and evil are expressions of corresponding Principles of Good and Evil, that disease is physical and independent of mind, and that the physical is the realm of cause. Our religious organisations and medical and other institutions in general are founded upon and have fostered these racial beliefs ; the inevitable results of which have been fear, sickness, old age and death. It is impossible for these beliefs to result any differently.

The realisation of the Oneness and Goodness of God, with the necessary implications of such realisation, will work a wondrous change in one's attitude of mind, and in his interpretation of the facts of existence, superseding negative conceptions by positive ones, instilling courage rather than fear, promoting harmony instead of discord, and creating health in the place of disease. One never fears Reality, but only that which represents his false concepts and beliefs.

Should this realisation become a racial belief, it would work almost a magical change in the existing systems of religion, medicine, commerce, politics, etc. All of these have been founded in fear and they are supported by fear ; with fear extinguished their nourishment would cease ; and they would be transformed into the image and likeness of their new inspiration of love and co-operation.

The cause of disease is false thinking that reasons from the basis of physical sensation, which traditional and racial conceptions interpret as representative of negative and destructive forces. Under these inherited and generally accepted beliefs, physical sensations induced either from within or without incite fear of pain and bodily harm ; and being interpreted as negative and destructive, the thoughts incited by them take form in the body as physical disease.

If sensation were interpreted spiritually, in the knowledge of Principle, if they inspired affirmative and constructive thoughts only, health would be their inevitable result. If the false beliefs and opinions based on physical sensation, once indulged in, were terminated it is obvious that there would be no longer an incentive to erroneous thought or physical disease. If one thereupon resumed his spiritual interpretation, it is clear that health would be restored comparatively soon, if not at once. No one consciously desires mental inharmony or physical disease ; but often, perhaps even as a matter of habit, he thinks the thoughts that cannot result otherwise. When his thoughts are of falsity, mere beliefs or opinions founded on physical sensation and hence interpreted wrongly, he really desires, invites or looks for disease ; and looking he finds, asking he receives. When one seeks and asks for health, in the knowledge of Truth, the response is quite as certain.

In fact, the response to affirmative and constructive thought, to spiritual understanding, to knowledge of the Truth, is often so rapid as to be practically instantaneous. Thoughts of error are usually permissive rather than purposeful, and they seldom have behind them the power of conviction and deliberate choice ; whereas thoughts of Truth may represent the mighty power of a spiritual conviction and the guarantee of freedom that is embodied in a deep realisation of Truth. The Truth thought may reverse one's whole attitude of mind, and in an instant shatter the error structure of a lifetime.

In order to effectually destroy disease it is essential that one recognise its mental cause ; he should acquire an understanding of the direction of the mind in its false reasoning and erroneous opinion ; he should eliminate these through knowledge of the Truth or Principle of Health ; he should realise that he is an Eternal Soul or Spiritual Being, and that his divine inheritance is Perfect Health. Not infrequently, the mere recognition of one's former errors of reason and opinion will suffice to restore normal ease.

Diseases may be and are now being directed, controlled, terminated and destroyed through scientific thought activity ; even though one's convictions are controverted by the racial thought, with its perverted opinions, prejudices and superstitions. As the race thought changes, and the belief in the mental cause of disease is more widely accepted, it will become increasingly easy to heal by mental methods. When the racial opposition has become a memory of the past, and this knowledge has become the conviction of humanity, a New Era will have been inaugurated, a period wherein health, harmony and happiness will prevail as never before.

When it shall have become the accepted racial belief that both the cause and cure of diseases are mental, diseases will gradually cease to be popular or respectable, or the subject of general discussion in polite society. This may eliminate much that now engrosses its attention, but doubtless their substitutes will be of a more beneficial character. Indeed the time may come when one would no more air his symptoms of physical disorder than he would accuse himself of criminal offences, or advertise the prison sentences that had been conferred upon him by an indulgent community.

Man is the creator of his own conditions of disease, and he may alter, change, modify or destroy these conditions. He may cease to energise them by withholding their sustenance of falsity. He may withdraw his support of misinterpretation, and let them fade away as their cause evaporates. They are but precipitations of thought forms and aggregations of invisiblities, and they may be persuaded to return to their native haunts and dissolve into apparent nothingness.

Man withdraws his support from disease when he substitutes knowledge of principle in the place of his previous false opinions regarding appearance and sensation ; and he eliminates the remnants of discord as he clarifies his understanding by substituting in the place of his belief in Duallty the realisation of Unity. There is no error in Truth ; there is no destruction in Principle. That which causes discord, inharmony and disease must represent error and destruction. These are unrelated to Truth or Principle, the realisation of which must inevitably be expressed by perfect health.