Chapter IX
SPIRITUAL MEDICINE
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“I will restore health unto
thee, I will heal thee of thy
wounds.”
--Jer. 30:17
[95] These
words of Jeremiah embody one of the
sweetest promises ever made to the race,
and yet it is one all too frequently
unfulfilled. Is it because God has
forgotten His promise, or because we have
lost the art of relying on this promise
that it has come to read as if it were
written for a special people, or a
limited period? If history tells us
truly, there was a time when men as
naturally turned to God for the healing
of their infirmities as they now turn to
material remedies. In the ancient Jewish
religious consciousness, the idea that
health, as well as life, was from God,
seems to have been firmly rooted. Hence
it was that they sought unto the Lord in
their disease, and never thought of
applying elsewhere until the Egyptian
sorcerers and medicine men corrupted
their thought and weaned them from their
reliance on That Only Which can be relied
upon.
“In
that age of simple child-like faith in
God,” says one, “men knew no
better than to apply to [96] Him directly
for the cure of their diseases.” It
would seem from this as if the old saying
were true that “where ignorance is
bliss, ‘tis folly to be
wise.” If men had remained in this
blissful and healthful ignorance, the
traffic in drugs would be much less, but
the general health of the world would be
vastly better, as is so clearly set forth
by Dr. Mason Good, who asserts: “If
all the drugs in the pharmacopeia of
Materia Medica were thrown into the sea,
it would be much better for mankind but
worse for the fishes.”
Professor
Bowen says: “After poisoning their
patients with drugs through many
centuries the doctors have at last come
to know their business better, and now
stand aside, so as to leave free course
to the curative agencies of the
unconscious, which alone can restore the
patient to perfect health.” If a
spiritual healer had said this he would
be accused of belittling the
“learned profession,” but
even the spiritual healer may be pardoned
if he agrees with Dr. Good, the
physician, and Professor Bowen, the
philosopher.
Our object
is not to ridicule the practice of
medicine in its material aspects, but to
ask if there is not, when this practice
has been tried and found wanting, a court
of final appeal to which the invalid may
take his case with some hope of a cure?
If physics cannot minister to a mind
diseased, then it were well, as
Shakespeare says, to “throw physic
to the dogs.” When material
remedies are found inadequate, as they
often are, it is well to go back to those
old practitioners of the [97] early
centuries who are quoted in ancient works
on medicine, and see how greatly they
emphasized the value of the mental. Says
one: “To give joy to the sick is
natural healing; for once make your
patient cheerful, his cure is
accomplished.” The wise man asserts
in his Book of Proverbs, “A merry
heart doeth good like a medicine,”
and another has said it doeth more
good than a medicine, for it leaves no
bad after-results.
These are
all ways of stating that there is
therapeutical value in the mental
attitude of the physician. A noted doctor
has said that “sympathy is a
powerful drug in the hands of a skillful
administrator.” And this brings us
to the consideration of Spiritual
Medicine as a something which one may
carry about with him far more
conveniently than he can carry the most
daintily bottled homeopathic pellets. If
a smile is worth $5,000 a year to a
physician, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once
declared, then it behooves us to
cultivate such qualities of soul as will
help and not injure humanity. A woman
once told me that one who is very near
and dear to her said to her as she
groaned with pain, “For
goodness’ sake don’t groan
so; it makes me nervous,” and this
to a woman who was seemingly in the
valley of the shadow.
It is at
such times as these that a patient needs
love more than lotions, and if we cannot
give love and exhibit unlimited patience,
it were better for the patient that we
stay out of the sick chamber, for we are
more of a menace to health than a [98]
means to its recovery. We injure those
whom we would benefit, and later suffer
the gnawing pangs of remorse when we
remember our past impatience, as we are
bound to do sooner or later. An irritable
nurse, no matter how much she thinks she
conceals her irritability behind a forced
smile, is more harmful than she realizes,
and if she cannot overcome her
irritability the only honorable course
left open to her is to seek some other
profession in which irritability is not
so injurious to others, though it will
always be so to herself.
An
ill-natured physician can do more in a
minute to depress the spirits of his
patient than all the drugs in his little
black bag can overcome in years.
Physicians have told me, and I have
observed it in my own practice, that when
certain persons visit their patients they
recognize it at once by the quickened
pulse and heightened temperature of the
patient. From this it would seem that it
were a matter for serious consideration
concerning our state of mind when we
visit our ailing friends. We should be
very careful not to discuss sickly
subjects or symptoms of disease, knowing,
as we should, that ailing people are very
sensitive and find it difficult to throw
off negative suggestions with the same
ease that they would if they were well.
An inconsiderate person will never become
a successful dispenser of Spiritual
Medicine, for the reason that he lacks
that without which there can be no
healing accomplished.
[99] If we
would heal as Jesus healed, we must
cultivate that mental attitude which
differentiated him from all other men. If
Jesus had one thing more than another it
was compassion, without which the letter
of the Law is but “sounding brass
and tinkling cymbal.” Compassion is
something more real and vital than mere
sympathy, as is evidenced by the fact
that sympathy can often be more injurious
than helpful. Sympathy has been defined
as, “that which takes on the
condition of that sympathized
with,” as when we are told that one
limb is gouty through sympathy with the
other, or that an eye has become inflamed
through sympathy with the other eye.
Compassion may be defined as that
attitude of the awakened soul which
recognizes the sufferings of others and
hastens to relieve them. It is for this
reason that the word compassion is
always used in the New Testament in
reference to the attitude of Jesus toward
suffering humanity, and never the word
sympathy.
This does
not mean that Jesus was unfeeling; it
simply denotes that while he recognized
his own power to dissipate those sorrows;
and when one does this he becomes an
infinitely more helpful servant to
humanity than if he merely wept with
those who weep, without in any wise
assisting in removing the cause of their
griefs. He had a medicine to give that
they knew not of, and it was a specific
for every ill that is known to the flesh.
In the first place he had cast out from
his own [100] consciousness everything
that was unlike God, for it is only as we
do this that we can cast out other evils
from the minds and bodies of other men.
We cannot give what we have not got;
therefore if we have no spirituality of
our own we cannot impart it to others.
Loving words without a love nature back
of them are as powerless to heal the sick
as moonshine is ineffectual to melt ice.
The hard Puritan who has no forgiveness
in his heart for the weaknesses of other
men will never heal the sick, no matter
how pious or devout he may be, for he
lacks that fire of Divine Love which
alone can consume with “fervent
heat” the sins and sickness of the
erring children of men.
Spiritual
Medicine can never be administered by one
who is terrified in the presence of
disease, for terror closes the tube
through which Love and Truth are poured
into human consciousness; neither can it
be successfully administered by one who
is so good in his own estimation that he
is appalled by the sins which are the
causes of other men’s sufferings. A
true divine compassion is neither
terrified in the presence of sickness nor
disgusted in the presence of sin, for it
knows that both are only apparent,
because only God is Real. When a man
knows that that only is real of which God
is the Author, he becomes inspired with
confidence in his ability to rise above
his own sicknesses and sins, and this at
once acts as a stimulant in the direction
of urging him to assist others to rise
above theirs.
[101] The
Spiritual Medicine which is always
acceptable and never distasteful to any
invalid is the blessed assurance that the
love of God is greater than all his fears
and false beliefs, and that this Love of
God will heal him if he will only trust
It. One thing must be clear to us, and
that is if God is the Author of disease
there is no remedy for it, and any
attempt to cure it with or without drugs
is as foolish as the attempt to empty the
ocean with a teaspoon. The fact that
disease can be cured by any system, human
or divine, proves that it is not of God,
for whatsoever is of God shall endure to
eternity.
When the
Psalmist sang, “Bless the Lord, O
my soul, and forget not all his benefits:
who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who
healeth all thy diseases; who crowneth
thee with loving kindness and tender
mercies, who satisfieth thy mouth with
good things; so that thy youth is renewed
like the eagle’s,” he
expressed in poetic language the idea
that all healing that is permanent must
come from the same source from which all
Health comes. So fully convinced was
David that God is the “strength of
our life” that he believed he could
save us from the so-called most fatal
conditions. In his wonderful 91st Psalm
he expresses this profound conviction
when he says that God will deliver him
“from the pestilence that walketh
in darkness, and from the destruction
that wasteth at noonday.”
When Jesus
healed the sick he did so by bringing
them into conscious contact with the One
and [102] Only life, and this then flowed
through them as water will flow through a
pipe when one turns on the tap. In
proportion as we look away from material
appearances to spiritual Realities, we
shall center into that Dominion
originally bestowed upon man by his
heavenly Father. Fear of disease is the
most prolific cause of disease, and the
only medicine that will destroy fear is
faith in God, for faith is a spiritual
medicine for which there is no substitute
in the drug store. Someone has said that
“Fear is faith in the wrong
thing.” If we had no faith in
disease we should never fear it, and if
we never feared it we would never have
it; therefore, it is easy to understand
that fear is faith in the wrong
thing.
The best
Spiritual Medicine that can be given to
the sick and suffering is the assurance
of their exemption as the children of God
from everything that is unlike God. It is
astonishing what changes can be brought
about when a man becomes convinced that
his diseases are not divine visitations.
At once they lose their terror for him,
and as consciousness expands in the
direction of this Truth, disease
disappears. It is literally starved to
death, for the only food disease has to
feed upon is fear and false belief; cast
these out by the purifying medicine of
Love and Truth and the patient is made
“every whit whole.” When a
man says to himself, “I am
sick,” it is as if he were taking a
slow poison; when he says, “I am
well,” it is as if he were taking a
sure and certain antidote.
[103] When
the Prophet Joel declared, “Let the
weak say I am strong,” he was
prescribing a remedy more infallible in
its efficacy than anything in the
material world. If weakness were real in
the sense that we have defined Reality it
would be folly for the weak to say,
“I am strong,” but if it is
only apparent, and it is only
apparent if God is not the creator of it,
then the sooner he learns to say,
“I am strong,” the better,
for by his words he will be justified,
even as by his words he has been
self-condemned.
In the
system of Jesus, the body of man was
healed by the restoration of the mind to
its normal functions. Jesus, so far as we
are able to discover, never examined his
patients to ascertain the condition of
temperature, pulse and blood pressure,
for he knew these were mere effects of
which some morbid idea or spiritual
ignorance was the predisposing cause.
Jesus, two thousand years ago, knew what
Sir George Paget discovered only recently
when he said, “In many cases I have
reason for believing that cancer had its
origin in prolonged anxiety.”
The results
of modern medical research are, day by
day, proving that not only was Jesus the
Great Physician, but that Spiritual
Medicine is the only safe and reliable
medicine in the universe. When we say
that the method of Jesus in the healing
of the body by spiritual means was the
restoration of the mind to its normal
state, after which the body had to
get well, on the principle that an effect
must disappear on the disappearance of
its [104] cause, we say what may be
demonstrated by any person who will set
aside his prejudices long enough to give
this method a fair trial. If long
continued grief can produce a malignant
disease, and it can, and the love of God
operating through the mind of Jesus can
dissipate, first the grief and then the
physical manifestation of it, is not this
a brief in favor of Spiritual Medicine,
and a hint to the wise for a more general
use of it? If fear is such a disease
producer as we now have reason to believe
it is, and if, “Perfect Love
casteth out fear,” as John the
Apostle declares it does, then it seems
that the more we take of this spiritual
medicine the better.
Hate and
anger create poisons of their own, as
Professor Gates’ experiments show,
for he assures us that “Enough
(poison) would be eliminated in one hour
of intense hate, by a man of average
strength, to cause the death of perhaps
four score persons, as these ptomaines
are the deadliest poisons known to modern
science.” Then how careful we
should be to avoid these emotions, if for
no nobler reason than sheer
self-protection. From all that we have
said and quoted it would seem as if the
need for spiritual medicine were great
indeed, so much so that every physician
should also be a preacher of the Gospel.
When he heals a case which he knows is
the result of wrong thinking he should
say what Jesus said to his patients,
“Go, and sin no more.” To do
otherwise is like saving or rescuing a
[105] drowning man’s hat, while
allowing the man himself to sink.
To center
our attention on the body while leaving
the soul untouched is nothing short of
quackery, no matter how
“regular” the doctor may be.
It is like breaking off the points of a
troublesome tooth while leaving the root
and the exposed nerve to give greater
trouble and suffering later. The aim of
all true healing should be to pour Truth
and Love to the waiting minds of men,
allowing these to do their own work of
purification.
Chapter
10
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
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(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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