Article selections by Reginald Birney | Notes by H.P.B.
I heard once of a distinguished physician who told his class in a large medical college that every known disease could be traced to a cold. He might have carried that statement even farther and said that every disease could be traced to a fear—conscious or unconscious—caused by a sense of separateness.
You ask where is the guarantee-the hall-mark by which the’ true Mental (or so-called Christian) Scientist may be known. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”1
As to the safeness of intrusting this power to the multitude, I am not in a position to judge. But “the powers that might be expected to intervene in order to prevent Keely’s inventions from becoming factors in human life” might, I venture to suggest, also be expected to intervene if “mankind is too selfish, too cruel, too stupid, too pitiless, too animal to be intrusted with minor ‘divine powers,’” for such the powers of Mental Healing certainly are.2
1. Just so. And it is precisely because we find these fruits abortive, by reason of the ever-failing attempts—as far as we have seen and heard—to cure a really serious disease by such means, that we permit ourselves to doubt the efficacy of Mental (or Christian) Science, in its modern garb and practice. It is not mental Science itself—thousands of years old—that we doubt, but the Scientists, whether Mental or Christian. We doubt as little the existence of such a Science in days of old, and the possibility of its revival in our age, as we do Theosophy, and the Wisdom-Religion, of which both Theosophy and Mind-Cure are part and parcel. But what we do say is that “many are the called and (very) few are the chosen.” Neither the Mental Scientist, nor the Theosophist, are such by the saying “by their fruits ye shall know them.” Two-thirds of the Mental (or Christian) Scientists and Theosophists are, we fear, but bad wine corked in good bottles.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
2. It is this pernicious doctrine of ever relying upon extraneous help that leads to the collapse—physical, mental, moral, and spiritual—of well-meaning, but weak and unbalanced minds. It slays the patient of the mesmeriser and the mental healer, the neophyte of the sorcerer, and the dilettante of Reform. Neither success nor safety is to be found outside self-development.—Ed. [H.P.B.]