Due to Imagination by GEO. D. BALLOU

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 1, 1915

Due to Imagination

By GEO. D. BALLOU

Mind Cure—No. 3

Due to Imagination

GEO. D. BALLOU

THERE are many invalids and semi-invalids who are so sensitive that they cannot read a list of symptoms without automatically beginning to feel those symptoms. Fakers and quacks, unprincipled doctors and patent medicine vendors, make rich profits from such persons. There is another class who are so full of imaginary ills that they are constantly worrying and fretting. Both these classes by persistent effort may succeed in really producing poor digestion, assimilation, circulation, and depuration, and suffer for years with impaired health. Now, the cause of their worry may be purely imaginary, but the results in the form of disease are just as real as though produced by taking some slow poison.

It is the habit of those who pay little attention to mental troubles to speak very lightly of the ailments of this class of patients, and treat them as if they were not real. What these invalids need is a change of environment, with employment, if possible, in caring for others more wretched than themselves. It costs much more skill and effort to cure dyspepsia or liver trouble caused by worrying than to cure the same disease caused by eating ham and eggs, broadside pork and Welsh rabbit.

Get the mind diverted from its own fears and perplexities. A study of the things of God as seen in the animal and plant worlds, or the study of astronomy, may be best for those who are more intellectual. Cheerful diversion, pleasant surroundings, and the care of something other than themselves, with all the necessities of life provided, will bring relief to persons of this class. The fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah presents the complete remedy. Any foundation for the permanent cure of mental ailments must be broad enough to provide for all past, all present, and all future troubles.

Much, very much, of the domestic infelicity which prevails in the majority of homes is due to the reading of fiction in childhood days which filled the mind with dreams of impossible things and conditions. The blood-and-thunder stories, the dramatic presentation of crime, and now the moving picture show are producing criminals more rapidly than they were ever produced before.

What is the remedy? — Simply a change in mental habits. That is all. A good habit of thought formed in childhood is just as easy to follow and just as hard to break as a bad one. Mold the child mind into right habits of thinking and he will not be likely to forsake them. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” But if the child is trained half the time in the home in correct ideals and half the time elsewhere in false ways of thinking, the outcome is doubtful. The only permanent remedy for all the ills due to the false workings of the imagination is the inculcation of true ideals until the false become distasteful and abominable. This will be, in most cases, a difficult task, requiring much time and patience.